Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)

We went to this movie on a whim, without seeing any previews or reading an reviews. And that's just the perfect way to see the movie. So anything I say here can be gleamed from the first five minutes.

The film follows a few days in the life of 15-year-old Mia (astonishingly played by Katie Jarvis). Disaffected and looking for anyway to escape her disengaged mother and their tight living quarters in public housing, she initially looks to hip-hop dancing as her way out.

As sympathetic as the film is of Mia's plight, the film's nearly claustophobic focus on the deadening (and drunken) world of the underclass living in subsidized housing provides an unflinching indictment of the world wrought by nineteenth-century industrialization and twentieth-century social policy.

Highly recommend.