Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

Andrea Arnold's second feature, following on from the harrowing Red Road, is also an exploration of frustrated lives on the wrong side of the tracks, this time at the other end of Britain, where the East End crumbles in a succession of estates and disused industrial sites into the countryside.
Mia is an embittered 15-year-old with a potty-mouthed sister and a single mother who doesn't give a toss, and her life revolves around just two foci: drink and hip-hop dance. For a while the film seems stuck in a perpetual rut until the mother gets a new live-in boyfriend, a charming Irishman who gradually brings the spiky teenager out of her shell.
Katie Jarvis, a teenager spotted by Arnold at a train station, is astonishingly magnetic as Mia, conveying both abrasiveness and vulnerability. Arnold's direction, meanwhile is even more assured and nuanced than in Red Road, repeatedly avoiding the obvious plot turns that the venerable likes of directors such as Ken Loach, who could be said to operate in the same genre of British underclass realism, are sometimes guilty of. It's a heartrendingly moving piece of work.

9/10