Film Recommendation

I remember being extremely shaken by Shane Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes movie when I saw it on its opening night in 2004 at the UGC Pickett’s Lock in north London. I’d taken a friend along who wasn’t really into film, and he seemed very bemused it. I remember him saying he hadn’t seen anything like it before. And he was right to think that, because actually there really isn’t very much like it out there, despite the fact that its director, Shane Meadows, is clearly in thrall to many 1970s staples such as Taxi Driver and Death Wish. Yet here he gives this dismal revenger's tale its own twist by having its grim machinations play out in a working class suburb in his own stomping ground of the midlands. It’s Scorsese by way of Martin Parr.