Lack of good storyline.

Just so...so bad

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

This Is England is a masterly crafted drama. The film manages to balance comedy and a sence of tragedy incredibly well throughout the entire film. The acting is simply brilliant. For a first-time actor, I was blown away by the performance of Thomas Turgoose, who played Sean. Stephen Graham, the actor who played Combo, provided the most effective and dramatic scenes in the film, and was absolutely fantastic. The writing seems incredibly real, and you feel as if you are almost watching a documentary because of how natural the dialogue feels. The cinematography is great, it is well-directed, and the story is captivating. My only criticism would be that the music, on occasion, does some of the thinking for you, and there were just one or two scenes I found to be a little cheesy. Definitely watch this film. You will be blown away by the realness of it, and it surely won't be a waste of your time.

England, 1983. 12-year old Shaun is aimless and bored. Into this void steps a bunch of young people who make Shaun feel like he belongs. They happen to be skinheads and are possibly not the best influence on Shaun...Great movie. Powerful examination on neo-Nazi, bigoted, skinhead culture in the UK in the early 1980s. The story is a metaphor for disaffected youth everywhere, and the evils of racism disguised as patriotism.Solid performances all round. Stephen Graham is great as the skinhead leader. Thomas Turgoose puts in a particularly good performance for a 13/14-year old.

Shane Meadows' This is England, like the title suggests, is a bare- knuckled, fearlessly honest depiction of England. This isn't any old England, but Thatcher's angry, graffiti-ridden, skinheaded England, a time of needless war, poverty, and, key to the film, racial intolerance. Meadows' loosely autobiographical film lays it's anger out for all to see from the off, as the camera lingers on a council-estate wall scrawled with 'Maggie is a t**t'. But there's humour here also, and heart.We witness the majority of the film through the eyes of Shaun Fields (Thomas Turgoose - his character's name a thinly-disguised spin on that of the director's), a ragged, bullied loner, who lives alone with his mother after his father is killed in the Falklands. Walking home one evening from school, he is pitied by Woody (Joseph Gilgun), a Dr. Martens-wearing skinhead who, along with his friends, enjoys some harmless vandalism taken out on derelict properties. Woody takes him under his wing, even buying him a Ben Sherman and braces, and shaving his head. His mum doesn't approve, but at least he's being looked after. All is rosy until Woody's old friend Combo (Stephen Graham) is released from prison.His time in prison taught Combo that England is no longer what it once was, and is now overrun by immigrants taking away jobs from honest folk like himself and his bare-chested, meat-head friend Banjo (George Newton). He draws a line for Woody's gang - those who want to join him on his crusade to help restore England to it's glory days, and those who don't. Woody quickly points out that Combo is out of line, especially in the presence of his Jamaican friend Milky (Andrew Shim). But when Woody leaves, Shaun stays, and is sucked in by Combo's charisma, attending right-wing rallies in countryside pubs and smashing up the local shop owned by a Pakistani man.Like Elem Klimov's Come and See (1985), the child protagonist does the remarkable thing of ageing throughout. Not a physical transformation like Florya, but in presence. He evolves effortlessly from a boy whining at his mum in a shoe shop for not buying him a pair of Dr. Martens, to a foul-mouthed, brainless thug gobbling up everything that is fed to him by those around him. Meadows makes it clear that there are two types of skin-heads - those who embrace the style and image influenced by black music such as ska, and those bigoted, entitled types, channelling anger simply because it's there. Combo is obviously the second kind, but he has own dimensions too.Stephen Graham's performance is spectacular and genuinely terrifying. Anyone who has grown up in England will know the type; the type thankfully I've only ever come across when they get on a train and quickly draw attention to themselves. His words fly like scouse venom, his every line punctured by a swear word. But his protection of Shaun and his occasional child-like vulnerability means that there's sympathy to be given somewhere. Like all great child performances, Turgoose remains a child throughout, avoiding precociousness even in his most emotional scenes. And it's 12 year-old Shaun that remains the film's anchor, our wide-eyed window into innocence manipulated.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

This movie was somewhat tough to know how to take. On the one hand - as a movie about coming of age - it's a fairly straight-forward, effective film. Shaun's anger and depression about the death of his father fighting in the Falklands is slowly eating away at him, and his new skinhead friends don't help him learn to cope with that, but they do give him a distraction and a sense of belonging that he obviously craves. Shaun is easily influenced, and Woody becomes a type of father figure to him, helping him find his own place in the world around him. On the other hand, though, the movie in very insular. Combo talks about the money and jobs lost to immigrants, but aside from the Falklands, there doesn't seem to be any real link between this group of skins and the outside world. They never seem to actually exist in the real world, other than the mob's trip to the National Front rally and when Woody's girlfriend heads to work. So when Combo decides to espouse his political points of view to the rest of the gang, it feels hollow and almost disjointed; here is this group of skinheads who never seem to work and do nothing except sit around, drink beer, smoke pot, and listen to records. And as Combo has spent the last several years in prison, he doesn't feel like someone who would be in the know about the political situation in England at the time. However, the details of the movie are fairly accurate. The National Front did play a huge role in attracting skinheads to their cause in the 80s, and the fashions are pretty spot on, as is the music. Although I think that the movie doesn't make much of an effort to pander to the uninitiated. If you don't know skinhead culture, you're going to find yourself lost on occasion. But by and large, most of the movie can be understood and appreciated without knowledge of what it is to be skinhead. Overall a decent movie, if not a bit two dimensional.