27th January 2010, FILM: Fish Tank

I'd heard that Andrea Arnold was a burgeoning voice in British gritty drama. And while Fish Tank doesn't exactly blow you away with originality, it ticks all the right boxes of the aforementioned genre in a good way. The story is of a young girl growing up on a council estate with a younger sister and a mother who doesn't care. When the mother gets a new boyfriend, things seem to change for the better. It's one of those films where the girl, excellently played by Katie Jarvis, has such a hard time, you're rooting for everything to work out OK, although you of course know that it won't. And it doesn't. Fish Tank wears its realism on its sleeve and does a good, if not outstanding, job of drawing you into its grim world.