Fish Tank

East London coming-of-age drama.

Fifteen-year-old Mia lives with her mother and sister in a few square meters of an East London apartment block, where boozing and sex are the adult’s top leisure-time priorities. When her mother’s new lover (Michael Fassbender) seems to support Mia’s dream of success as a hip-hop dancer; the girl’s stubborn isolation is briefly broken down. But director Andrea Arnold, who made only her second film with this brilliant, formally daring, and intense puberty drama, doesn’t grant her protagonist any easy solution.