billcr12 Would you like to be really depressed for eighty five minutes? London to Brighton will accomplish that and more. Set in the underbelly of London's seedy crime world, this is the story of eleven year old runaway Joanne, who, at the start is coerced into prostitution by her companion, Kelly. Her first client is an old mobster who ends up dead before deflowering the young girl. This sets off a chain of events, with the dead man's son, Derek looking for his father's killer.Everyone in the film is constantly drinking , smoking, and behaving badly in general. The working class criminals speak with Cockney accents, which grew tiresome to this American's ears after a while. The actors are convincing, as if they were recruited from prison. Georgia Groome is outstanding as Joanne, the troubled young girl at the center of the movie. Gritty and sad, London to Brighton will not brighten up your day.

ian_bell Few films ever live up to expectation, and when I read the blurb for this one I did wonder if there might be a similar letdown.Not likely, though.Paul Andrew Williams has crafted a drama, with thrilling overtones, which could stand almost as a companion piece to Gary Oldman's Nil By Mouth from 1997. Yet this is a film which stands entirely on its own, and even puts Nil By Mouth in the shade with an ending both realistic and poignant.The performances are excellent. Georgia Groome is disturbingly believable as a 12 year-old girl caught in the world of vice, and Lorraine Stanley, as a prostitute caught between her conscience and a need to stay alive, is similarly gut-wrenching. Also effective is Sam Spruell as a very unpleasant man called Stuart Allen, a man representative of the London underworld, and a man determined to track the above two young women down with frightening and horrific consequences.The star turn though, is arguably Johnny Harris. As Derek, he will make your flesh crawl, yet, despite his many shortcomings - and be warned, his character is repellent - there is something also vaguely humorous about him. His facial expressions when talking and listening to his boss are comic to behold. Derek is terrified of Spruell's Mr Allen, and with good reason. That terror, combined with his own greed and need to save his own neck give the film an extra dimension.This is a seriously good film.It is not easy to watch, and some of the violence and language are hard to take, but in a tepid film industry such as Britain's, the arrival of a talent such as this should be noticed.Paul Andrew Williams, it's time to make your next move. May it be as great as this one.

Jackson Booth-Millard I remember This Is England being one of the most realistic British films I had ever seen, and I felt the same satisfaction after finishing this powerful crime drama. Basically prostitute Kelly (Lorraine Stanley) with twelve-year-old newcomer Joanne (Georgia Groome) are on the run heading to from London to Brighton after doing something terrible. Originally Kelly's pimp Derek (Johnny Harris) with associate Chum (Nathan Constance) are in pursuit of them, with orders to find them by mobster Stuart Allen (Sam Spruell). As the girls hide out and the boys try to find them, we see what the girls did through a series of flashbacks. Derek needed to find a twelve-year-old girl to perform sexual acts for mobster Duncan Allen (Alexander Morton), Stuart's father, and Kelly found Joanne on the streets. After being offered a good amount of money Joanne accepts her job, she and Duncan get together, but Kelly stops them when he was attempting to rape her, and they kill him. So Derek and Chum eventually find the girls in Brighton, take them to a meeting place where Stuart is, and you'd expect him to want to kill the girls after the boys dig their graves, but actually he kills the boys, and the girls are let go. Also starring David Keeling as Charlie, Jamie Kenna as Tony, Chloe Bale as Karen and Claudie Blakley as Tracey. Young Groome is very good, Stanley is superb, and Harris is menacing, as with This Is England the performances and story is so realistic it is disturbingly good. It was nominated the BAFTA for the Carl Foreman Award for the Most Promising Newcomer for director Paul Andrew Williams. Very good!

paul2001sw-1 'London to Brighton' is a modern film, but has a peculiarly eighties feel to it. In the heyday of Thatcherism, an endless stream of radical film makers wanted to document the plight of the underclass. While Britain has become more affluent in the subsequent years, this does not mean that all social problems have disappeared; but except for films about the plight of immigrants, this sort of movie appears to have vanished as a genre. Perhaps this is one signal of Thatcherism triumph: that (usually middle class) film-makers are no longer interested in the plight of the poor. 'London to Brighton' is not just (or even mainly) a work of social compassion: it's a violent gangster thriller, but it takes place in a Britain best described as squalid. And one is struck at how unfashionable it seems to be to paint the country in such a light; and how commonplace it once was. Aside from these observations, the film is well acted, beautifully shot and and genuinely harrowing. But it takes place in a landscape almost devoid of hope. We don't know what made the characters into the people they are - and I found myself increasingly detached at the end, because of the clear impossibility of a happy ending. Indeed, I didn't know really what I was supposed to make of the fact that the eventual conclusion was not the worst imaginable. It's a short film, but although the initial premise is gripping, it eventually suffers from the absence of wider context - "girl goes home" is a less powerful ending to a story if we have no idea of why she went away. That's not to say it's bad, in many ways it feels more real than Neal Jordan's authentic eighties gangster and prostitutes movie 'Mona Lisa', to which it makes an interesting companion piece. But Jordan's movie had a more involving plot.