Sometimes it's hard to think of witty relevant film or TV quotes.

The second feature from Oscar winner Andrea Arnold looks at the life of a teenage girl in a housing estate on the London Essex borders of Havering and Dagenham/Barking, a 15 year old bully who has a foul mouth, can put up a fight, has a troubled home life, and secretly dances when nobody is watching. Played stunningly in her debut by Katie Jarvis, the lead character Mia does lots of walking around in very Gus Van Sant style sequences, but unlike Van Sant, has a place to go to each time, and though sometimes she does some horrible, horrible horrible things, thankfully she has so much to care about as well that for the most part you can tolerate the character, and wonder where her life is going.

When you see her homelife, with a vulgar, drunken, slutty mother and very vulgar younger sister, who is not in the film enough but is extremely funny, we see the environment that caused such a persona. After some tough moments Mia's mother brings home a new man, Connor, played to perfection by Michael Fassbender, a character who suddenly brings some warmth into the cold house. Connor sees Mia dance, and although she acts annoyed and harshly, he constantly supports her, and cares for her, even when the rest of the family doesn't. Slowly as Mia finds a boy and gets a job audition Connor's relationship with Mia gets to a sickly tense point.

As the film suddenly and drastically changes for the final half hour we see Mia go from a sensitive teen trying to keep a facade up to a girl who just can't care anymore, and will do anything no matter how repulsive just at the spur of the moment.

The pace is rather odd, it's 2 hours and certainly feels like it, especially when there are long shots of the Essex/London area, which might be interesting to some people, just feels like looking out anywhere, only projecting onto a cinema screen, however sometimes it's fun to spot the places you know, and in one case with a scene on a c2c platform at Tilbury, it felt like being there, without the cold and damp feeling from being outside.

The acting is top notch, absolutely flawless in it's realism, Fassbender is on excellently sweet and slightly odd form, and Miss Jarvis certainly breaks out as a wonderful talent, and even though the film isn't a masterpiece, or completely interesting like a lot of reviewers claim, it's a solid character study, an English Gus Van Sant film without the really annoying long drawn out stuff.

8/10