This Is England: Critic Reviews

Even if the story is misty in its didacticism: No matter how tough the times, just say no to racism and hatred.

A modest, near-flawless gem, This Is England is a humbly, if insistently political, autobiographical homage to a lost world of youth.

This is English cinema.

Humane and complex.

There's a gutter pride taken in how aggressively Shaun confronts the world, but there's also a blunt, no-nonsense analysis of where the kid goes wrong.

Isolated excellence and larger lack of nerve-all dots, no connection-grows frustrating as England turns from the personal to the political, from character study to social studies.

Turgoose, in his first film role, is entirely convincing.

A drama that's so potent and persuasive yet also natural and intimate that it almost has the heft of a documentary.

The movie is taut, tense, relentless. It shows why Shaun feels he needs to belong to a gang, what he gets out of it and how it goes wrong. Without saying so, it also explains why skinheads are skinheads.

Masterfully charted and acted, as are the boy's early forays into sex.

Until the final scene of Meadows' edgy, uneasy film, the suspense is killing.

A movie about the allure of groupthink and how the warm comfort of being surrounded by peers wilts all sense of balance.

This is England is a vile exercise in nihilism that goes nowhere fast.

With its knockout lead perfs and taut if slightly familiar construction, this '80s-set dramedy about a skinhead gang reps Meadows' most fluently made film so far.

The lensing by Daniel Cohen captures the day-in, day-out dreariness of dead-end lives, and the musical soundtrack is infectious.

How sad and predictable is the fate of those who counsel violence as a means to an end. And yet how poignant it all seems when viewed through Shane Meadows' thoughtful lens.

You wouldn't think a film about a group of British skinheads during the early 1980s could be a sweet, nostalgic coming-of-age period piece, but that's the surprise of the authentic, fresh and utterly relevant This Is England.

It's one of the simplest and best re-creations of downscale urban England during the gritty post-punk years ever put on screen, and it's both upsetting and very funny.

This Is England may be set in 1983 but it's as relevant today as it was then.

Its tough but moving neo-realist approach make it one of the better British films of recent times.

The writer-director brilliantly juxtaposes the personal and the political, bookending a stirring coming-of-age drama with the provocative opening and an equally affecting end sequence.

It is the war within him--and by extension, within the minds of many embittered, working class young men left behind in Thatcher's England--that Meadows's film most strikingly portrays.

Steeped in the raw mix of ska and punk sound as expression of the youth alienation and misguided rage of those tumultuous times, an alarming voice of the surging army of jobless youth back then dubbed 'no hopers.'