text: I can't recommend this film as a date movie. Gary Oldman's semi-autobiographical account of life lived on a South East London estate is a violent, Beckettian account of one of Dante's circles of hell, frankly. At the centre of it is Ray Winstone, who has done this sort of character before but never as well. The film opens with him ordering drinks at a pub bar - that's all - and you are already gripped with a sense of the frustration, self-loathing and barbarism that he exhibits in many different ways throughout the course of the movie. It's an acting masterclass.<br /><br />Of course the stymied and dispossessed need a foil in a drama such as this and Winstone is matched by Kathy Burke as his long-suffering wife, who absorbs and ultimately rejects his unbearable behaviour. Charlie Creed-Miles does an able turn as the fuse-lighting druggie son Billy although he must have wondered sometimes exactly what he let himself in for. Gary Oldman directs close up on the actors, maximising the claustrophobia of their council flat squalor. 4/10