Keith Salmon The best films I have seen recently have been directed by visionary female directors. Clio Barnard's The Selfish Giant is a bleak but beautiful masterpiece that, through its elegiac settings and panoramas and its understated central performances manages to excoriate the ravages of capitalism without speeches and sermons. The comparisons with Kes are fitting - not just in terms of the harsh Yorkshire setting, but in the way both films use small details in seemingly humdrum lives to make profound observations about society's iniquities. You don't want to overload such a composed, assured and (in the best sense) quiet film with hyperbole but, for all it's still-life framing and underplay, some of The Selfish Giant's themes of fate and misfortune are Shakespearean. It's completely fair to call this film a modern classic.

jandesimpson British cinema has long been telling us "it's grim up north." Directors certainly piled on this message during our '50s and '60s New Wave. Up in Scotland, as Bill Douglas in his Trilogy let us know, it could be even grimmer. In some of the work of Tony Richardson ("A Taste of Honey" for example) the grimness could be softened somewhat with poetic images of industrial landscapes. Nothing wrong with this. "Honey" is a lovely film in many ways, but if a director wanted to be hard-hittingly grim he had to jettison poetic visuals as Lindsay Anderson did in "This Sporting Life", possibly the greatest film of our New Wave. There have been innumerable "grim" films with northern settings since with occasional outstanding examples as Ken Loach's "Kes" and more recently Shane Meadows's "This is England." Into this august company steps Clio Barnard with "The Selfish Giant" remarkable for painting possibly the bleakest picture I have come across of life north of The Wash. True there are some beautiful shots of cooling towers and others of horses in misty landscapes but these barely relieve the unrelenting sordidness of the way families of no-hopers live on the fringe of a northern city.. The opening scene introduces Arbor, a disturbed, hyper-active kid being fished out screaming from underneath his bed by his constant friend, Swifty, to go on a night time forage for scrap metal. Although they are in the same class at school, Swifty seems that much older and more mature by virtue of a voice that has already broken. The boys always do things together, whether it is being excluded from school or nicking scrap to sell to the unscrupulous dealer, Kitten. Eventually Arbor goes one step too far when he nicks scrap from Kitten to sell elsewhere. Ordered to replace the stolen cable results in a shocking and unbearable tragedy. "The Selfish Giant" is one of those films that doesn't give up its secrets straight away. When I first saw it I was sickened by its unrelieved sordidness, with foul-mouthed characters such as Swifty's father acting completely without respect or compassion for anyone, but with the death of one of the boys some three quarters of the way through, the film begins to achieve a level of intensity that makes for mesmerising cinema. Arbor is not able to articulate his grief on the death of his friend but the long wait in the rain outside Swifty's house, his eventual acceptance by the grieving mother and the affectionate grooming of the horse in the the final shots say it all. Herein lies the compassion we have been longing for, the very stuff of great tragedy.

Larry Silverstein This is a brutally stark and powerful dark drama, which I would say is impeccably written and directed by Clio Barnard, and the cast gives such realistic performances you won't even know they're acting.The two leads here are terrific. Connor Chapman stars as Arbor, an extremely hyperactive 13-year-old, who often does not take his medication, and has enormous problems with authority figures. Shaun Thomas co-stars as Swifty, who is polar opposite to Arbor in personality being soft-spoken, kind-hearted, and has an affinity for horses. Yet there's no question the two boys have an inseparable bond.Set in England, facing dire poverty at home and bullies at school, they are emboldened when they're able to receive cash from the local unscrupulous scrap metal dealer for some stolen wiring. Sean Gilder is perfectly cast as the shady dealer named Kitten. Arbor and Swifty proceed to go out and try and collect any metal they can find in the neighborhood or steal whatever they can get away with.They begin to take more and more risks to obtain the goods to sell, and Arbor even begins to "bite the hand that feeds him", as he steals from Kitten and tries to sell the merchandise at an out of town dealer. However, he's exposed and after being physically threatened by Kitten ends up being sent on a dangerous assignment to try and steal some underground cable worth thousands of dollars, but which could be still electrified.When Swifty joins him there you can see tragedy could be just around the corner, and the movie doesn't disappoint in that regard.This a difficult film to watch, and normally may have been too grim for me, but I was glad I stayed with it, and the power of it stayed with me well after it was over. I might mention in closing that if you have any sensitivities to raw language, pretty much every other word here is a swear word. I felt it belonged though in the context of the realism of the film.

evanston_dad A tale of misery set in a working class, poverty-stricken area of the UK.Films like "The Selfish Giant" are important, I think, because they make the audience aware of just how grim life is for certain people living in the world, but who fly under the radar of our popular media and so never get exposure. We know how miserable things are in parts of Africa because a big Ebola outbreak makes headlines; or how miserable people in parts of the Middle East are because terrorist groups carry out sensational, news-grabbing acts. But no one is ever talking about how miserable certain areas of the UK (or anywhere else for that matter) are because the kind of misery and poverty that exists there is too mundane to catch anyone's interest."The Selfish Giant" is about two young boys, both outcasts to a certain extent, who only manage to weather their bleak existence because of their shared friendship. The movie is an examination of two different personality types -- one hot-tempered and angry, the other sensitive and soft -- and the possibility either of them has for making it in their environment. It's a deeply sad and depressing film, because we know neither of these boys really has a chance to escape their worlds and do anything much with their lives. The writer/director tries to scrape together a somewhat hopeful ending, but it's so meagre and comes after so much awfulness that it feels more like an obligatory apology for making us sit through something so grim.I liked the filmmaking of "The Selfish Giant," but would never want to sit through it again.Grade: A-