In FISH TANK, 15 year old Mia's life is turned on its head when her mum brings home a new boyfriend. Arnold casts the same unflinching, unprejudiced gaze and touches on the themes of her Oscar-winning short Wasp to create an original and unsettling tale for our age....--©Official Site
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Reviews
The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
"Having now watched Fish Tank a second time, I am more exhilarated than ever by Arnold's idealism, and in a movie marketplace where so much is vapidly cynical, this is a mistral of fresh air."
11/09/2009
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The Independent
Anthony Quinn
"Arnold controls this simmering tension as adroitly as she did in her first film: it's a real skill to present quite unpleasant characters and then reveal them as vulnerable, even loveable. She is also blessed with a remarkable eye for place. Fish Tank balances the urban against the bucolic, first in virtuoso shots of a tethered white horse by a motorway overpass, later in a long, heart-stopping, sequence that changes from suburban Tilbury to the ominous marshlands of coastal Essex."
11/09/2009
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Empire Magazine
Philip Wilding
"Set on an estate caught between the sprawling fringes of London and the countryside leading out to Essex and the coast beyond, Andrea Arnold’s bucolic yet grimy second feature is an unlikely heartbreaker. Played out against the pockmarked A13 and the leafy environs set at its borders, Fish Tank is a social drama of cramped interiors and maladjusted lives abutted by scenes of breathtaking countryside, the latter courtesy of Robbie Ryan’s expansive cinematography."
02/11/2009
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The Financial Times
Simon Schama and Karl French
"This is a thriller of sorts, the kind of thriller that Ken Loach might make in collaboration with Michael Haneke, a slice of social-realist cinema in which we are never sure what – if anything – is about happen. It’s oppressively pessimistic but also utterly gripping."
09/09/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Tim Robey
"Even by Fassbender’s high standards, this is a spellbinding turn, and the film shifts gears unmistakably whenever it’s around him. Arnold coaxes totally convincing performances from Jarvis, who ably suggests awkwardness and shyness beneath Mia’s keep-off exterior, and Rebecca Griffiths as her younger sister Tyler, a swearing tyke with an amazingly filthy laugh."
10/09/2009
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The Times
Kevin Maher
"In all this, Arnold draws flawless performances from her cast while making exemplary choices with her camera — she shoots Fassbender in particular with a fantastically lusty eye, casually catching the low-slung jeans, the navel exposed and the wiry naked torso. However, there are some cracks in Arnold’s methods. Her treatment of class is curious, and vaguely patronising. The attempts to draw laughs from trash culture values is certainly ill-advised."
11/09/2009
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
"The British writer and director Andrea Arnold’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed Red Road is a far better film. Once again, we're in the concrete jungle of the contemporary council estate, where life is slow, nasty and brutish."
13/09/2009
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The Observer
Philip French
"Fish Tank is a forceful, deeply depressing movie, less enjoyable than Arnold's Red Road, but not quite as pessimistic."
13/09/2009
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Time Out
Dave Calhoun
"Arnold avoids obvious judgements, obvious explanations. Hers is an intimate drama of grey areas and all the better and more thoughtful – and thought-provoking – for it."
10/09/2009
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The Daily Mail
Chris Tookey
"Dreary and unoriginal, like hundreds of its sub-Ken Loach predecessors, this is how Billy Elliott might have turned out had it been made by a collective of depressive Essex girls. "
10/09/2009
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