A prostitute and a young teen girl become the targets of a London mobster after their tryst with the latter's father goes awry. This is an interesting if flawed feature film debut for writer-director Williams, who manages to create a tough and gritty atmosphere inhabited by low-life characters. Williams tries to create tension by using extreme closeups, but he overdoes it to a point where it becomes an annoying gimmick. The plot is simple and efficiently executed, but it doesn't add up to much more than a slight diversion. There are good performances from Stanley as a good-hearted prostitute, Harris as her uptight pimp, and Groome as a runaway teen.

This is a very raw, rough first feature (BAFTRA nominated) by Paul Andrew Williams.He wrote & produced the film as well.The film runs a very fast 85 minutes including 4 minutes of credits. It is a low budget film about some very unlikeable people, the sort nearly all of us would not bother with or would want know. They all are brutal & foul mouthed.However we do care, to some degree for them.The cast are mostly newcomers or featured players from TV) I never heard of any of them). I definitely want to see them in other films. Lorraine Stanley plays a working street girl. Georgia Groome (all of 14 when film was made) is new to the streets.Johnny Downs is the evil pimp, & Sam Spruell as the sadistic son of a client. They & the others in cast do fine jobs as these unsavory person.Normally I stay far from this type of film,BUT this time I was mesmerized, The hand held camera work was not as annoying as it usually is & most of my readers know I eschew foul language. Here it comes across as natural. It is like a Tarantino movie without the humour. That part I liked.Being a minor,low budget,no name cast feature from the UK It only had a short few theatre run in the USA.in Feb 2008.Look for this on Cable or rent it,I am sure you will agree it is watchable.There are some plot holes, but film moves fast & they are easily ignored.Ratings: ***1/2 (out of 4) 91 points (out of 100) IMDb 8 (out of 10)

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!

'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.