London to Brighton

Character-driven thriller, which plays out against a backdrop of desperation, self-loathing and grinding poverty.

Very good but very grim, Paul Andrew Williams' punishing debut doesn't pull many punches - although the characters certainly field their share of body blows.

A chilling pulp movie told with a pavement-eye view of the dregs of humanity.

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams' unnecessarily hectic debut feature won several British film festival awards, no doubt for its bounty of low-budget stylized violence and blood, as well as its thing for prostitutes and runaways.

A slice of social realism, a wedge of naturalism, a symbolically freighted fairy tale -- at times, London to Brighton feels like all of these combined, which, before it all turns to mush, gives the film the aspect of a fascinating and ambitious pastiche. There’s something provocative about Mr. Williams’s attempt to join together so many conflicting, contradictory influences, even if in the end they manage only to cancel one another out.

Does what it does well but too often seems a pointless exercise in British miserabilism crossed with a nasty gangster yarn.

LTB offers a fresh (if grimy) contribution to kitchen-sink realism, but little to the tiresome persistence of vicious British gangster chic.