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Just perfect...

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

While I'm writing this, The Selfish Giant is on Dutch TV. It is one of those British productions which comes so close to realism it makes you wonder if the actors actually exist as people. There isn't much hope in this world a violence and desperation. Even the friendship between the two young outsiders runs into trouble. Adults are mostly brutes, though one broken down mother still tries to give love. This is no easy watching, though the barren city landscape is shown with an eye for Gothic beauty. The camera even sees art in a heap of scrap metal. The two destitute boys with their pony cart for collecting and stealing copper wire and refuse hobbling along on the motorway make the world of people with money and motor cars seem eerily far off. This is what good filming can do. A great addition to the Ken Loach-style of realism and a shocking view on the caste society still alive in England where the poor will always be poor and the rich don't care.

Expelled from his local high school, an impoverished teenager takes to collecting scrap metal for an unscrupulous dealer in this British drama very loosely inspired by Oscar Wilde's story of the same name. Both Wilde's tale and the motion picture involve the exclusion of children with detrimental impacts and the film is highly critical of society on a whole for pushing the young protagonist out of the system without trying to understand him, leading to him being manipulated by others. Conner Chapman is convincingly frustrated as the lad in question; however, he is also so utterly obnoxious for the most part that it is not always easy to care what happens to him. He has no respect for anyone around him and is rarely ever pleasant. He also brings much of his misery upon himself with his thoughtlessness and impulsiveness. The film would seem to argue that this is merely the result of him being ADHD and not medicated, but knowing this does not make it any easier to sympathise with his plight and it is only really in the final ten minutes that we truly get under his skin and understand how affected by life he can be despite his cavalier attitude towards everything. And yet, while the story could have been much more affecting, director Clio Barnard certainly has the right approach to the material with moody skies, ominous twilight shots of nuclear cooling towers and downbeat urban wastelands. One truly gets the sense that the environment here is just as much a problem as young Chapman himself, with it being the combination of the two that leads to tragedy and disaster.

While not audacious and brave in it's style as Barnard's smashing debut "The Arbor", it explores much of the same territory – poverty in northern England. But this time Barnard uses a more neo-realist bent that recalls the films of Ken Loach, among others. And after two viewings, while I missed the wild rule-breaking she did in her first film, I felt she had made a film of gritty honest and emotional force. The story centers on two young teens (very well played by non-pros). Diminutive Arbor is hyperactive, angry, and so on the edge he can be frightening and simultaneously heartbreaking -- Arbor needs meds just to allow him to be calm enough to function. And there's Swifty, his best friend who is introvert to Arbor's extreme extrovert. Swifty is willing to go along with Arbor's schemes to a point, but he also wants to honor his mother's wish that he get an education, and try to move up and out of poverty. The two begin collecting (and sometimes stealing) scrap metal to sell to a tough local junk metal dealer, Kitten. This is a man who is capable of being almost a father figure one moment, and stomping you into the ground the next. A sort of modern Fagan, using the boys to do his bidding (although, to be fair, the boys come to him). A dark, moody and ultimately deeply disturbing film, that refuses to let us or society off lightly when it comes to kids growing up in the cycle of poverty.

Painfully truthful social realism at its most painful and fragile form . Fully brilliant and abstract genius. When that little is so much and when that is large so little - what's a few pounds extra in Bradford's poorest and vulnerable areas really worth? Is it worth a few scrape? A few broken bones? Some blood? Someone's life?Last time I saw something like this incredibly vulnerable and genuine was 2011 in Warp X-film Tyrannosaur, also a British film that plague one's mind with soiled hyper-realistic social realism. But regarding genuineness in every single small frame, The Selfish Giant is even better.It hurts a little extra in the chest, a lump is in my throat - oh, this was a movie! I thought I was teleported to Bradford. I'm sold , take my extra pounds, I do not care - you have tortured me enough.The spectacle is so incredible that I do not for a second think of the fictional character that is playing in front of my eyes.What hurts most is that I can not give the movie or the play, or motion pictures, more than a 7/10, that is a little hard, but that's all I can spare when I put the film in context to other movies I rated.