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.

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-

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.

Bradford has not changed one bit, and England neither, even in Yorkshire. At least it has changed since the early 1990s when I visited it regularly. I guess it is not exactly what Oscar Wilde might have imagined though, but we can forget about the nuclear power station: it is not from Wilde's time.The film is so strong that we just can't believe some one has actually tried to produce and direct it. And I am not speaking of the accent. I am speaking of the human relations among the people there in front of our eyes.You have those you hardly ever see. The teachers and school officials who are absolutely locked up in their authority game and in there syllabus targets and their official pedagogy that means detention hall every day, if possible, and humiliation any time you can, till you kick the kids you do not like out of the school for good because you just don't know how to deal with the world the way it is and it is not that gentle and pink sweet.Then you have the coppers and the few times you can catch a glimpse of them, they are very nice, polite, nearly submissive. Do they really do their job of protecting people against danger? Probably not. They protect society against dangerous people, probably, though it looks more like protecting the normal people we never see in the film, those from the good neighborhoods, against the totally marginalized asocial – so they say in the good plush neighborhoods – people of the socially devastated and dilapidated areas of the city. Don't expect to see the cinema, the cathedral, the city hall, the wool exchange of Bradford and I was surprised we had a glimpse at the Queen Victoria Hotel. So what is the interest of the film?To center on kids, boys exclusively, out of primary school and in secondary or comprehensive school, and how they do not want to be treated like children, to be taken to doctors and fed all kinds of drugs to make them play the game of overgrown children. They want to live, to be independent and autonomous. They want to earn a living, in any way possible, even if dishonest. So far so good. These children are not treated, including of course by their fathers, when they have one that is mentionable, the way they should and they are made psychotic more than anything else.The worst part of it though is that from a little theft to a big one there is only one connection to find, and in this case it is a salvage yard managed by someone who is accused of being a Romani, a gypsy if your prefer. He gives them good money for the metal they bring, even if far from what he should give them, and he rips them off and f*** them up or exploits them in all possible ways. But yet he does not hold them, the kids I mean, only with money. He owns horses and he holds them like that: he lends them a draught horse and a cart for their scavenging in the day time and he has a racing horse he entrust to one of the young kids. That magic connection with the horses is what really matters.The end then is absolutely tragic because you cannot steal live copper electric cable if you are not equipped properly. But the best part is after this tragic ending, the way two mothers can manage to salvage the survivor, how the dead kid's mother salvages the survivor. That is so human, so strong that it saves the film, it salvages our disbelief. Yes somewhere on this earth, not very far from us there are children who live that kind of hell on earth and they, some of them at least, manage to survive and grow up into adulthood. Girls have prostitution. Boys have the survival of the fittest and the death of the softest.Such fates are stronger and more powerful than all the possible philosophies of this world, including Buddhism actually.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU