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100Arnold deserves comparison with a British master director like Ken Loach.
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100The only person who seems to understand the angry teen is mom's new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender of Hunger), though their friendship oscillates between intimate and vaguely creepy.
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91The amazingly natural first-timer was discovered, in a gift of publicity-ready truth, while having an argument with her boyfriend at a train station.
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90Andrea Arnold has crafted a scene that approaches a literal embodiment of the term "kitchen-sink drama" here is most likely coincidence; nevertheless, her film is a bold new entry in that long-standing British tradition of disquieting social realism.
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90Absolute dynamite.
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90Arnold's first feature, "Red Road" (2006), centers on another outsider, a woman who monitors security cameras. The film is formally brilliant, but it doesn't have the breathtaking openness of Fish Tank.
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90The 17-year-old so completely captures the innocence, cynicism and rage of a child of poverty and divorce on the edge of adulthood that it feels as if you are spying on Mia, so achingly real, so tangible does her world seem here.
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90The contradictions of adolescence have rarely been conveyed with such authenticity and force.
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90What makes the picture feel special is its unflinching honesty and lack of sentimentality or moralizing, along with assured direction and excellent performances.
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90It's been a good while since I've seen a movie whose most powerful sequence was both unforeseen and entirely unpredictable as it played out.
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89Fish Tank isn't an easy watch – it's like two hours of ache – but there are rich rewards to be had in the many ways Arnold and her terrific team rend us to and fro.
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88While you're remembering new high-impact names, add Arnold. In only her second film, after 2006's "Red Road," she keeps the screen filled to bursting with the beauty and raw terror of life.
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88A remarkable downer-upper paradox: a bruising tale of teenage resilience, honest and emotionally complicated and alive.
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88It's oppressive and claustrophobic, confused and scary in there. But it's also compellingly real.
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88A brilliantly acted and achingly bleak coming-of-age story.
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88In many ways Fish Tank joins "An Education" and "Precious" as an acute, empathic portrait of a girl growing up, but more than those films Arnold leaves viewers with a feeling of unsettled ambiguity.
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88It's not comfortable but it is engrossing.
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80The film belongs to Jarvis, however, and she makes the most of it with expressive features that convey Mia's mixed-up emotions from raging temper to sweet vulnerability. She will go far.
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80Arnold generally steers clear of cinematic melodrama, and Jarvis infuses the entire film with the sort of kinetic spirit that heralds a new talent.
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80A vivid portrayal of life at society's margins with a compelling turn from newcomer Jarvis. Little wonder it scored at Cannes.
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80Fish Tank manages to be about exploitation without being exploitative. For my money--and without opening up the "Precious" debate again--it's by far the better movie.
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80Fish tank may begin as a patch of lower-class chaos, but it turns into a commanding, emotionally satisfying movie, comparable to such youth-in-trouble classics as "The 400 Blows." [18 Jan. 2010, p. 83]
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75Fish Tank is grim, to be sure, but it leaves us with a feeling of hopefulness.
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75Fish Tank should be seen for what it does well and for what it hints may come, if Andrea Arnold and her audiences are lucky.
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75A half-century ago, "kitchen sink realism" began its harsh existence on the British stage and then migrated to the screen where, over the years, the genre has taken up permanent residence, maturing into a gritty art...Now add Andrea Arnold to the directors' list and Fish Tank to the kitchen. It's classic low-rent realism – you can almost smell the grease on the unwashed dishes.
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75Fortunately, Fish Tank feeds us more than crumbs and leaves us feeling like we've come up for air.
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67Like "Red Road" it's slow-moving and sometimes grueling, but it's more of a chronicle than narrative, a series of slices-of-life rather than an unfolding and increasingly engrossing enigma.
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67In that way, Jarvis is a lot like Arnold: an artist who knows the steps, but doesn't yet have all the moves.
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50Even as it stands, Fish Tank is a valuable movie, though it aspires to a social insight it doesn't attain and a psychological penetration it won't maintain.
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Jarvis gives a ferociously persuasive performance in an otherwise routine tale of domestic disaster.
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40A grimy kitchen-sink melodrama with an Ajax cleanser script: The muck is all surface, the turmoil cleanly shallow and contrived, though never less than gripping.
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