The gang-movie genre tends to follow a fairly predictable arc: Impressionable youth is seduced by gang life, enjoys the wild times and camaraderie that follow, then inevitably winds up disillusioned with the lifestyle. Whether it's the mods and rockers of 1960s London in "Quadrophenia," or the favela drug gangs of '70s Rio di Janeiro in "City of God," the cautionary nature of the tale rarely varies.
That's true too of Shane Meadows' "This Is England," which zooms in on skinhead subculture in Britain's Midlands in 1983.
Meadow's film is a great gang movie simply due to its specifics: The filmmaker spent some time hanging with skins in his youth (he even had a bulldog tattoo done), and his film bears all the marks of real experience. But beyond that, Meadow's film excels because it refuses to view gang culture in a vacuum. The director/writer draws provocative parallels between the personal and the political, showing how — as punk historian Jon Savage best put it — each era gets the teen nightmare it deserves.