I love this film. It’s compelling, violent and ugly, with nary a likeable character in it, and it makes me feel like I need to have a shower. But it’s stunningly well written and acted, and features one of the most realistic drug-taking scenes ever made.

I really like Shane Meadows. This Is England is also brilliant, easily the best film I’ve seen this year.

Shot in Matlock in Derbyshire, this is a very dark film. It’s one of those movies which hangs around in your thoughts for a couple of days afterwards.

Shane Meadows captures the whole vibe perfectly, including (startingly) what it’s like to take rather a lot of LSD.

This is a tale of revenge, which doesn’t glorify violence at all.

Recommended

This film was utterly confusing to me for the first hour and a bit, then suddenly all made sense near the end. It was cleverly designed like that (or I am exceptionally un-sharp when it comes to movies), and you got that nice ‘ahhh’ moment when it made sense. Hard to say ‘nice’ about this movie though, when it was so dark.

It was recommended to me by a mad scotsman, who told me that another movie the director made (Once Upon a Time in the Midlands) was utter crap, and the director even thought so, and that Dead Man’s Shoes was his masterpiece.

Not really my type of movie, but because he did it so well, I was able to jump genres for a while and see what life is like for the mad scotsman and other types.