Director Shane Meadows has returned to Nottingham for This Is England, a semi-autobiographical film set in the 1980’s. It centres on an 11 year old boy called Shaun and his gang of skinhead friends, and has been described as a 'masterpiece’ by critics, winning Best Film at the British Independent Film Awards last year, beating The Queen.

This is England is an “electric, stunning and powerful movie, crammed with extraordinary performances”, says Jonathan Dean in Total Film, who gave it five stars out of five. “As a snapshot of youth, [it] is timeless. Shaun is a sponge, absorbing everything from sex to booze to smokes to ideas.”

“It’s the last day of term in his Nottingham estate and a summer of opportunity awaits. But having recently lost his dad in the Falklands, the 11-year-old latches onto father figures left, far right and centre…and first Woody and then Combo take him under their wing. The former is jocular – buying his protégé a Ben Sherman shirt and inviting him on wasteland ‘hunting’ trips. The latter is intense – gifting Shaun a St George’s Cross and taking him along to National Front meets.”

Ben Walters in Time Out was impressed by Meadow’s “confident pacing and the superb performances of the young ensemble”. He was certainly not the only critic to praise Meadows inexperienced cast. There was also near-unanimous appreciation for the opening montage, “cross-cutting between Roland Rat and Maggie Thatcher, rioting and the royal wedding”, which makes clear that “the heart of Britain was troubled in 1983”. It seems that offering a trip down memory lane never harms a film’s chances of gaining favourable reviews from 30-something critics. But Walters liked much more than this. This is England, he says, “offers assured insights into the pleasures and wages of tribalism, and the ease with which both the urge to belong and individual insecurities and resentments can be grievously spun into political capital”. Walters also enjoyed “the music, whose enjoyment initially marked skinheads as early adopters of multiculturalism.”

Despite all this, there is certainly little nostalgia, says Dan Jolin in Empire. “This is 80’s painful memory.” It is, however, “deeply impressive, as both a recreation of the 80s working class England and an intimate tale of one childhood’s...”, well of childhood. His review becomes a spoiler, so we’ll cap it there.

Meadows has covered the lives of the working classes in the Midlands in previous films, “and if there is one weakness”, according to Jolin, “it is that the same event has influenced Meadows’ previous work; if you’ve seen the curiously neglected A Room For Romeo Brass or the chilling Dead Man’s Shoes, you’ll quickly sense where This Is England is going way before Meadows’ deft tweaking of the tension provides its own signpost. His work is preoccupied by weak-centred bullies — idiosyncratically charismatic personalities who elbow their way into his protagonists’ lives under the cover of friendship and unsettle the status quo; and This Is England utterly conforms to the blueprint.”

“Yet such predictability is superseded by the sheer quality of the performances,” concedes Jolin.

Todd on the Twitch film website, who reviewed the film when it was shown at the London Film Festival last year, agrees that the cast is “very strong”, and says the film is “masterful”. “Meadows has long been known for drawing quality performances out of his actors,” says Todd, “but special mention must be given to a pair of actors in particular. The first is Thomas Turgoose, the young actor who portrays Shaun and gives the film its heart. Turgoose is a first time performer being given difficult, complex and demanding material and he proves remarkably up to the challenge of capturing the spirit of the times despite not having been alive during them. The second face that deserves high praise is Stephen Graham as Combo. Best known for his part as Tommy in Snatch, this is without a doubt the finest performance of Graham’s career and the sort that should place him in very high demand. Combo is the sort of character that would be deathly easy to reduce to a cartoon, the simply minded violently racist thug. And he is those things, but is much more as well and Graham easily takes on the complicated psychology of this man.”

Paul Huckerby in Electric Sheep Magazine found the film at times felt “like an After School Special or Play for Today to warn children against playing with racists.” However it is “far more complex”, down to the fact that Meadows is “depicting something that he understands on a more instinctive level”. An example of this is the way Meadows deals with his characters. “The racists aren’t demonised and the film is all the stronger for making them more human, less mindless; and the racism all the more disturbing. However, it is the racist swearing that has somewhat controversially, earned the film an 18 certificate,” reports Huckerby. Still, despite all the bad language, and a minor quibble about the “pleading acoustic guitars emphasising those introspective moments”, Huckerby thought This is England could be his favourite British film of the noughties.

Shane Meadows was shocked by the 18 certificate given to his movie by the BBFC, a decision so devisive it has actually been overturned by some city councils, who have reclassified it a 15, the rating Meadows had envisaged. “The film is now unavailable to the audience it will benefit the most”, Meadows told the Guardian. “To be honest I don't understand it because, yes, the film is affecting but I think it's something that someone of 15 can cope with. It's not like it's a film about the 80s that has no value; it's incredibly relevant politically. It's as much about Iraq as it is about the Falklands. It's as much as about England in 2007 as it is about England in 1983.”

Meadows affection for the 80’s shows through not just in the opening sequence but in the attention to detail paid to the film, according to Jordan Harper on Pixel Surgeon. “I’ve never seen a more convincing picture painted of the England I grew up in than here,” says Harper, “from the giant fried-egg jelly sweets to the haircuts, to the NF graffiti dauded on the walls of corner shops and toilets. Make no mistake,” he warns us, “This is England is not a sentimental portrait of halcyon days gone by, but neither is it a gloomy picture of life in a depressed country.”

This is England is, says Harper, “a masterpiece, a complex yet paradoxically simple character study about growing up and learning not about about right and wrong, but motivations and personal strength…I really can’t recommend it enough.”

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