Fish Tank

Drew's Thoughts:
Fish Tank, Oscar-winning writer/director Andrea Arnold's coming of age story, is sort of an amalgam of Precious, An Education and Save the Last Dance; fortunately, it's better than all of those.
After a shaky start, the film finds its legs and ends up being pretty good. The film follows 15 year old Mia (played by Katie Jarvis) who lives with her mum and younger sister in low-income housing in London suburb, Essex. Her days consist of wandering around, watching MTV, and drinking two liter bottles of generic brand cider and practicing her dance moves in a vacant apartment.
Things change when her mum gets a new boyfriend Connor (Hunger's Michael Fassbender) and this is when the movie starts taking shape. Jarvis and Fassbender's scenes together are the heart of the film really and the exploration of their relationship is the most interesting aspect of the film.
The charismatic Connor is a lot nicer to Mia and her mum and sister than they are to each other and they are all rather smitten with him. He also encourages and aids Mia's interest in dancing, making Connor a quasi-father/older brother figure as well as an object of desire.
The film seems like it should have been slimmed down by at least 20 minutes; various symbolic bits and subplots, such as a white horse chained up in empty lot that Mia repeatedly tries to free, aren't really necessary or that effective. However, the bulk of the movie is good and suprisingly engaging. Fassbender is good as well and I think Katie Jarvis should definitely be added to the list of Best Actress contenders at the Dolphins this year.