Somers Town.

"What there is of Somers Town is mostly delightful," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "The picture originated as a promotional short by [Shane] Meadows for the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras, which is why the original idea is credited to Mother Vision - not a nun with media ambitions, but the TV and film arm of the advertising agency Mother London. The short was then expanded by Meadows and the writer Paul Fraser, but its origins are easily discernible, like an old wallpaper pattern visible beneath a new coat of paint."

Updated through 8/25.

"It's a slight, gentle, sweet-natured comedy shot in black and white, and blessed with a lovely performance from Meadows's great find, Thomas Turgoose, the teenage star of his previous film This Is England," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "Turgoose has a natural flair for laughs... [H]e's a true likely lad, like a young James Bolam, or perhaps the standup comics Ken Loach recruited to star in his excellent, underrated rail privatisation drama The Navigators, from 2001. Remarkably, he is still only 16: I could easily imagine Turgoose being a stand-up comedy star in his own right."

The Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu finds it "a work of integrity, a touching piece of dream-cinema, an almost unquantifiably delightful film that revives the spirit and good humour of Carol Reed's A Kid for Two Farthings (1955)." Meadows "has made his best film to date."

"What's striking about this Midlands storyteller is that he is able to explore the comic and tragic absurdities of small-town life in a populist, invigorating fashion, moving with swagger and ease from laughs to tears and back again," writes Dave Calhoun in Time Out. "He is good, too, at extracting performances from youngsters. Brotherly friendships are at the heart of his films, including this latest, which, owing to its slight knockabout feel and running time of barely more than an hour, should really be considered his fifth-and-a-half."

"It is a genuinely pleasant watch," finds Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "However, it is never quite tough enough to convince entirely."

"It's not the film's origins as a commercial that grate; indeed, aside from shots of the St Pancras spire and some on-train filming, Eurostar doesn't figure much," writes the Independent's Anthony Quinn. "What scuppers it is a dismal lack of drama."

"It aspires to the new wave of London immigration thrillers by Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things) and Anthony Minghella (Breaking and Entering)," writes James Christopher in the London Times. "But it's not cruel enough."

Online viewing tip. Xan Brooks's review for the Guardian.

Earlier: Mark Sinker in Sight & Sound and Neil Young's Somers Town page.

Update, 8/25: The Observer's Philip French on the Somers Town area: "A number of significant films have been set there over the years, most famously the great Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (1955). Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa (1986) exploited the locality's reputation for sleaze. In High Hopes, the 1988 film with which Mike Leigh, a major influence on Meadows, returned to the cinema after a long absence, the hero's elderly mother lived in a backwater beside the old gasometers. Most recently, the district's bustling sense of change and renewal was the social dynamic for Anthony Minghella's final film, Breaking and Entering, the plot of which foreshawdaows the altogether slighter, more modest Somers Town." As for the Eurostar commission, "The phenomenon is not new. Ford paid for Karel Reisz's We Are the Lambeth Boys and Lindsay Anderson's Every Day Except Christmas, the Free Cinema films of the late 1950s that launched the British New Wave. It's better than Hollywood's current pursuit of lucrative 'product placement.'"

Posted by dwhudson at August 22, 2008 7:27 AM