Somers Town (2008) Direction: Shane Meadows Screenplay: Shane Meadows, Paul Fraser Cast: Thomas Turgoose, Piotr Jagiello, Elisa Lasowski, Kate Dickie, Ireneusz Czop, Perry Benson Thomas Turgoose, Piotr Jagiello in Somers Town The happenstance friendship central to Shane Meadows’ Somers Town buds within a small black-and-white world, an environment populated with aesthetic lines, distinct or unseen, that stretch retrograde towards an urban horizon. Convergence is not merely suggested through contrast and forms, but is realized as ubiquitous in the neighborhood around the film’s young men. A district of London in the shadows of St. Pancras railway station, Somers Town is at a point of transition. New construction and redevelopment abut decades-old council flats and working-class cafes. Rather than lament gentrified encroachment and its broad [...]...
- 12/8/2009
- by Doug Johnson
- Alt Film Guide
Somers Town was written by Paul Fraser (Heartlands) and directed by Shane Meadows (This Is England). Both also worked together on Once Upon A Time In The Midlands, returning to bring this coming of age story to the screen. The film follows two young teenage boys from different backgrounds who happen upon each other and become an awkward sort of best mates. Somers Town is a tale of friendship that circumvents social barriers and obstacles.
Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) is a redheaded boy from East Midlands in England, having arrived in London on his own account with no place to go and no one to call his friend. He’s quickly preyed upon by a small gang of teenage hoodlums who take what little possessions he has. Tomo now must fend for himself without food, clothes or money and ultimately begins to employ some of the same traits as the boys...
Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) is a redheaded boy from East Midlands in England, having arrived in London on his own account with no place to go and no one to call his friend. He’s quickly preyed upon by a small gang of teenage hoodlums who take what little possessions he has. Tomo now must fend for himself without food, clothes or money and ultimately begins to employ some of the same traits as the boys...
- 10/9/2009
- by Travis
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
'Celebrating cinema's emerging talents' - That's our new slogan, and I think tMF has come a long way, but of course there is still room for improvement. I think we're lucky that our viewers care enough to tell us both our good and bad points. The October edition of the Top 50 Hitlist will reflect all these... In the meantime, tMF puts the spotlight on today's rising stars - these are the guys who really made a lot of buzz - grabbed plum roles despite intense competition and would be working with the industry's topnotch filmmakers, and more.
Find out who they are - you've certainly heard some of them and a few might be unfamiliar names, but take a closer look - you might be missing some names who are still 'under the radar' but would soon be rockin' the scene!
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As in the past,...
Find out who they are - you've certainly heard some of them and a few might be unfamiliar names, but take a closer look - you might be missing some names who are still 'under the radar' but would soon be rockin' the scene!
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As in the past,...
- 9/30/2009
- by modelwatcher@gmail.com (Jed Medina)
- The Movie Fanatic
'Celebrating cinema's emerging talents' - That's our new slogan, and I think tMF has come a long way, but of course there is still room for improvement. I think we're lucky that our viewers care enough to tell us both our good and bad points. The October edition of the Top 50 Hitlist will reflect all these... In the meantime, tMF puts the spotlight on today's rising stars - these are the guys who really made a lot of buzz - grabbed plum roles despite intense competition and would be working with the industry's topnotch filmmakers, and more.
Find out who they are - you've certainly heard some of them and a few might be unfamiliar names, but take a closer look - you might be missing some names who are still 'under the radar' but would soon be rockin' the scene!
- - -
- - -
As in the past,...
Find out who they are - you've certainly heard some of them and a few might be unfamiliar names, but take a closer look - you might be missing some names who are still 'under the radar' but would soon be rockin' the scene!
- - -
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As in the past,...
- 9/30/2009
- by modelwatcher@gmail.com (Jed Medina)
- The Movie Fanatic
'Celebrating cinema's emerging talents' - That's our new slogan, and I think tMF has come a long way, but of course there is still room for improvement. I think we're lucky that our viewers care enough to tell us both our good and bad points. The October edition of the Top 50 Hitlist will reflect all these... In the meantime, tMF puts the spotlight on today's rising stars - these are the guys who really made a lot of buzz - grabbed plum roles despite intense competition and would be working with the industry's topnotch filmmakers, and more.
Find out who they are - you've certainly heard some of them and a few might be unfamiliar names, but take a closer look - you might be missing some names who are still 'under the radar' but would soon be rockin' the scene!
- - -
- - -
As in the past,...
Find out who they are - you've certainly heard some of them and a few might be unfamiliar names, but take a closer look - you might be missing some names who are still 'under the radar' but would soon be rockin' the scene!
- - -
- - -
As in the past,...
- 9/30/2009
- by modelwatcher@gmail.com (Jed Medina)
- The Movie Fanatic
'Celebrating cinema's emerging talents' - That's our new slogan, and I think tMF has come a long way, but of course there is still room for improvement. I think we're lucky that our viewers care enough to tell us both our good and bad points. The October edition of the Top 50 Hitlist will reflect all these... In the meantime, tMF puts the spotlight on today's rising stars - these are the guys who really made a lot of buzz - grabbed plum roles despite intense competition and would be working with the industry's topnotch filmmakers, and more.
Find out who they are - you've certainly heard some of them and a few might be unfamiliar names, but take a closer look - you might be missing some names who are still 'under the radar' but would soon be rockin' the scene!
- - -
- - -
As in the past,...
Find out who they are - you've certainly heard some of them and a few might be unfamiliar names, but take a closer look - you might be missing some names who are still 'under the radar' but would soon be rockin' the scene!
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As in the past,...
- 9/30/2009
- by modelwatcher@gmail.com (Jed Medina)
- The Movie Fanatic
Write what you know, the old chestnut echoes, and that's precisely what celebrated British filmmaker Shane Meadows has been doing since his 1997 feature debut "TwentyFourSeven." Meadows' naturalistic, working class dramas all seem to be at least partly based on real-life experiences, from the drug-addled friend who was bullied into suicide -- the inspiration behind his revenge thriller "Dead Man's Shoes" -- to the violence-prone skinhead pals from his youth that turn up in "This is England." One of the films is even entitled "Once Upon a Time in the Midlands," which is precisely where the BAFTA Award-winner was born, raised, and still lives today.
The rare exception to Meadows' typical small-town locales, then, is his latest, "Somers Town," which still features what film buffs might call kitchen-sink realism, but is transplanted to the titular neighborhood in central London. In a second collaboration with young Thomas Turgoose (who stole the show...
The rare exception to Meadows' typical small-town locales, then, is his latest, "Somers Town," which still features what film buffs might call kitchen-sink realism, but is transplanted to the titular neighborhood in central London. In a second collaboration with young Thomas Turgoose (who stole the show...
- 7/16/2009
- by Aaron Hillis
- ifc.com
For the idiosyncratic director Shane Meadows (probably best known on this side of the pond for This is England, about a 1980s British childhood and falling in with a gang of skinheads), his latest feature, Somers Town, started when Eurostar commissioned Meadows to make a short film celebrating a new train to Paris. It's a funny match, of course: Meadows is known for his rough and tumble stories of hardscrabble British youth, while the Eurostar is sleek and high-falutin'. Happily, the resulting (full-length) flick is not an advertisement for the wonders of train travel, but a meandering, likable movie, taking teenage kicks and commenting on the state of England that's like 'Superbad done by Mike Leigh,' according to one of the ever-astute commenters on The Onion A.V. Club. Somers Town premiered at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival (a longtime supporter of Meadows), where its charming leads Piotr Jagiello (Marek...
- 7/15/2009
- TribecaFilm.com
If Bart Simpson were British, and black and white instead of yellow, he'd be a lot like Tomo (Thomas Turgoose), the indestructible young street scamp who saunters through "Somers Town," a north London neighborhood that tries but fails to keep him down.
The film is directed in newsprint-quality black and white by kitchen-sink realist Shane Meadows, who discovered Turgoose three years ago for "This Is England," his perceptive film about 1980s London skinheads. But dingy as it is,...
The film is directed in newsprint-quality black and white by kitchen-sink realist Shane Meadows, who discovered Turgoose three years ago for "This Is England," his perceptive film about 1980s London skinheads. But dingy as it is,...
- 7/15/2009
- by By KYLE SMITH
- NYPost.com
Somers Town is director Shane Meadows’ follow-up to his acclaimed 2007 film This is England (I considered it one of the year’s best), reuniting him with This is England’s young star Thomas Turgoose. The pairing feels so right once it becomes clear that Somers Town is a spiritual sequel, dealing with similar themes of immigration and multiculturalism in modern-day England.
Somers Town takes a significantly less darker approach to the themes, centering on the friendship between two teens, one a native Brit and the other a Polish immigrant. Turgoose plays Tomo, a 16-year-old who ran away from a rough home in the Midlands to the gritty streets of London, where a lonely immigrant his age named Marek (first timer Piotr Jagiello) befriends and shelters him.
After confronting xenophobia so thoroughly and intensely in This is England, Somers Town is the perfect show of progression, as we see how two...
Somers Town takes a significantly less darker approach to the themes, centering on the friendship between two teens, one a native Brit and the other a Polish immigrant. Turgoose plays Tomo, a 16-year-old who ran away from a rough home in the Midlands to the gritty streets of London, where a lonely immigrant his age named Marek (first timer Piotr Jagiello) befriends and shelters him.
After confronting xenophobia so thoroughly and intensely in This is England, Somers Town is the perfect show of progression, as we see how two...
- 2/9/2009
- by Arya Ponto
- JustPressPlay.net
- I've yet to see the Ken Loach-like portrait that was supposed to have a “short” lifespan, so I'm thankful that Film Movement have once again grabbed an audience pleaser that the IFC folks haven't yet gobbled up. The anecdote that follows the film is: that Shane Meadows never intended to blow up this b&w, shot in 10 days Somers Town into a feature film, but experiment with a 26 page story-line panned out into something that had a decent festival life and collected accolades making it two-for-two after This is England (read our interview with Meadows on that picture). Expect an upcoming July release for the picture. Two teenagers, both newcomers to London, forge an unlikely friendship over the course of a hot summer. Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) is a runaway from Nottingham; Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a Polish immigrant, lives in the district of Somers Town, between King's Cross and Euston stations,
- 2/2/2009
- IONCINEMA.com
Edinburgh International Film Festival
Seldom can such a fine feature-film have had such an unlikely genesis as the wonderful coming-of-age comedy-drama "Somers Town", initially commissioned as a 20-minute short by train company Eurostar to publicize their high-speed London-to-Paris connection. Hats off to the organization for allowing director Shane Meadows and writer Paul Fraser to organically develop this seed into a proper movie, one which confirms Meadows as among the most accomplished -- and now, after a couple of early-career hiccups, consistent -- British film-makers under 40. While unlikely to repeat the commercial success of Meadows' last effort, skinhead saga "This Is England", "Somers Town" is just the kind of heartfelt, superbly-observed miniature that will attract passionate admirers wherever it's shown.
Crucial to the film's success are the terrific central performances by Thomas Turgoose (youthful star of "This Is England") and newcomer Piotr Jagiello as Tomo and Marek, both around 16, who end up in the same scruffy corner of north London for wildly divergent reasons. Scrappy, diminutive Tomo has fled his native north-Midlands and a deeply problematic home life, which he's reluctant to discuss; lanky photography-nut Marek has arrived with his hard-drinking father, who's found accommodation in Somers Town while he working on the Eurostar rail-link at nearby King's Cross. After initial friction, the pair rapidly become best pals and rivals for the affections of French waitress Maria (Elisa Lasowski.)
Shot on monochrome HD, "Somers Town" doesn't appear much at first glance. The situations depicted are decidedly undramatic, chronicling the kinds of things youngsters get up to in the summer when they have time on their hands and limited cash. But we soon realize that while the script relies on vivid humor, it manages to do so while unobtrusively reminding us of these eminently believable characters' difficult perhaps even tragic circumstances and backstories.
Meadows and cinematographer Natasha Braier present their story with a gritty, unfussy lyricism that finds unexpected glimpses of beauty in overlooked corners of London. Though black-and-white for most of its running time, there's an unexpected, colorful coda which ends proceedings on a truly joyous note by which point you may find this deceptively slight little picture has, on the sly, built quite an emotional wallop.
Production companies: Tomboy Films / Big Arty / Eurostar. Cast: Thomas Turgoose, Piotr Jagiello, Elisa Lasowski, Ireneusz Crop, Perry Benson. Director: Shane Meadows. Screenwriter: Paul Fraser. Executive producers: Greg Nugent, Nick Mercer, Robert Saville. Producer: Barnaby Spurrier. Director of photography: Natasha Braier. Production designer: Lisa Marie Hall. Music: Gavin Clarke. Costume designer: Jo Thompson. Editor: Richard Graham. Sales Agent: The Works International, London
Not Rated, 75 minutes.
Seldom can such a fine feature-film have had such an unlikely genesis as the wonderful coming-of-age comedy-drama "Somers Town", initially commissioned as a 20-minute short by train company Eurostar to publicize their high-speed London-to-Paris connection. Hats off to the organization for allowing director Shane Meadows and writer Paul Fraser to organically develop this seed into a proper movie, one which confirms Meadows as among the most accomplished -- and now, after a couple of early-career hiccups, consistent -- British film-makers under 40. While unlikely to repeat the commercial success of Meadows' last effort, skinhead saga "This Is England", "Somers Town" is just the kind of heartfelt, superbly-observed miniature that will attract passionate admirers wherever it's shown.
Crucial to the film's success are the terrific central performances by Thomas Turgoose (youthful star of "This Is England") and newcomer Piotr Jagiello as Tomo and Marek, both around 16, who end up in the same scruffy corner of north London for wildly divergent reasons. Scrappy, diminutive Tomo has fled his native north-Midlands and a deeply problematic home life, which he's reluctant to discuss; lanky photography-nut Marek has arrived with his hard-drinking father, who's found accommodation in Somers Town while he working on the Eurostar rail-link at nearby King's Cross. After initial friction, the pair rapidly become best pals and rivals for the affections of French waitress Maria (Elisa Lasowski.)
Shot on monochrome HD, "Somers Town" doesn't appear much at first glance. The situations depicted are decidedly undramatic, chronicling the kinds of things youngsters get up to in the summer when they have time on their hands and limited cash. But we soon realize that while the script relies on vivid humor, it manages to do so while unobtrusively reminding us of these eminently believable characters' difficult perhaps even tragic circumstances and backstories.
Meadows and cinematographer Natasha Braier present their story with a gritty, unfussy lyricism that finds unexpected glimpses of beauty in overlooked corners of London. Though black-and-white for most of its running time, there's an unexpected, colorful coda which ends proceedings on a truly joyous note by which point you may find this deceptively slight little picture has, on the sly, built quite an emotional wallop.
Production companies: Tomboy Films / Big Arty / Eurostar. Cast: Thomas Turgoose, Piotr Jagiello, Elisa Lasowski, Ireneusz Crop, Perry Benson. Director: Shane Meadows. Screenwriter: Paul Fraser. Executive producers: Greg Nugent, Nick Mercer, Robert Saville. Producer: Barnaby Spurrier. Director of photography: Natasha Braier. Production designer: Lisa Marie Hall. Music: Gavin Clarke. Costume designer: Jo Thompson. Editor: Richard Graham. Sales Agent: The Works International, London
Not Rated, 75 minutes.
- 6/26/2008
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
A Swedish horror film and a documentary following a female peace activist in war-torn Liberia has scooped the top awards at New York's Tribeca Film Festival on Thursday.
Let the Right One In - directed by Tomas Alfredson - took the award for Best Narrative Feature, beating 11 other finalists.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell - directed by Gini Reticker and narrated by singer Angelique Kidjo - won Best Documentary Feature. Both films each won $25,000 (GBP12,500).
Other films to be honoured at the festival include My Marlon and Brando (Best New Narrative Filmmaker Award ) and Spanish director Carlos Carcas won Best New Documentary Filmmaker for Old Man Bebo.
The Best Actor in a Feature Film award went to Thomas Turgoose and Piotr Jagiello for their roles in the British film Somers Town, while the Best Actress Award went to Eileen Walsh for her role in the Irish movie Eden.
The Tribeca Film Festival, co-founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, celebrated its seventh year. They founded the festival in 2001 following the attacks on the World Trade Center in a bid to spur the economic and cultural revitalisation of lower Manhattan through an annual celebration of film, music and culture.
Let the Right One In - directed by Tomas Alfredson - took the award for Best Narrative Feature, beating 11 other finalists.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell - directed by Gini Reticker and narrated by singer Angelique Kidjo - won Best Documentary Feature. Both films each won $25,000 (GBP12,500).
Other films to be honoured at the festival include My Marlon and Brando (Best New Narrative Filmmaker Award ) and Spanish director Carlos Carcas won Best New Documentary Filmmaker for Old Man Bebo.
The Best Actor in a Feature Film award went to Thomas Turgoose and Piotr Jagiello for their roles in the British film Somers Town, while the Best Actress Award went to Eileen Walsh for her role in the Irish movie Eden.
The Tribeca Film Festival, co-founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, celebrated its seventh year. They founded the festival in 2001 following the attacks on the World Trade Center in a bid to spur the economic and cultural revitalisation of lower Manhattan through an annual celebration of film, music and culture.
- 5/2/2008
- WENN
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