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Critics Consensus: Starkly emotional and beautifully directed, The Selfish Giant uses a lovely script and some powerful performances to present some of the best that modern British cinema has to offer.
Critic Consensus: Starkly emotional and beautifully directed, The Selfish Giant uses a lovely script and some powerful performances to present some of the best that modern British cinema has to offer.
All Critics (82) | Top Critics (23) | Fresh (80) | Rotten (2)
"The Selfish Giant" is a story of dependence, damage and desperation, told with grit and grimy frankness. It's also a portrait of friendship born of need and emptiness, on the road to nowhere.
Clio Barnard's The Selfish Giant isn't the Oscar Wilde children's story, but more an inspired take on it in the kitchen-sink style of a Ken Loach drama.
Ultimately, it's a sad, tough sit - but worth seeing for its gritty honesty and strong cast.
Much of the movie is hard to bear, yet it never drags, thanks to the momentum that Barnard finds in the fable, and, above all, to the energy that she unleashes in her young leads.
[A] wrenching story of working-poor desperation in northern England.
The Selfish Giant is a film of such power and beauty that there will be no escaping it -- so long as you go to see it in the first place.
A social-realist contemporary re-working of Oscar Wilde's children's tale of the same name, this film is unapologetically miserable, gritty, British cinema. And it's brilliant.
The Selfish Giant is a powerhouse of a film, a huge success as Clio Barnard's first narrative.
It never feels particularly fresh, but it does feel real and true, is superbly performed, and it does pack quite an emotional punch. I had to gather myself afterwards, and I'm still gathering myself, and may be gathering myself for some time to come.
"The Selfish Giant" is a beautiful, profound, perfectly acted film... but I can't say you should watch it, because it is so unbearably sad that you'll be completely sorry you started it.
If you know any teenage boys with anger issues or a tendency to get into trouble, this movie definitely speaks their language.
In the absence of any apparent formal conceit, Barnard's parable is still raw enough to wound while its emotional impact could wring tears from metal.
Barnard displays an incredibly firm hand in the direction of this powerful piece of British social realism that brings to mind the works of Ken Loach and is above all a rich character study with a great onscreen chemistry between the excellent Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas.
Super Reviewer
'The Selfish Giant'. The sucker punch of that first beautiful frame to the relentless bleakness that follows is cruel. Miserable, masterful. Outstanding, gritty performances from first-timers, and a director whose future I will follow eagerly, given the worlds she seems to want to delve into.
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In an attempt to calm down his best friend Arbor(Conner Chapman), Swifty(Shaun Thomas) takes him for a midnight ride on a horse. Along the way, they steal some copper cable which utility workers had already appropriated for their own profit and sell it to Kitten(Sean Gilder), a scrap dealer. That money comes in handy for the truancy fine Arbor's mother(Rebecca Manley) has to pay. However, she does not become fully suspicious until the boys try to wash their own clothes. That is not the end of their troubles as Arbor is expelled from school for defending Swifty from a group of bullies who in turn is suspended for ten days. Written and directed by Clio Barnard, "The Selfish Giant" is an exacting, beautifully filmed and timeless tale of an upside down world where children attempt to take care of the adults, aging too quickly in the bargain. A sign of this is industrial decay resulting in the desperation that leads to people like those in Detroit stripping the infrastructure of whatever is not nailed down. Even with all of that going on, Swifty finds his opportunity from the most unlikeliest of sources. The tragedy of Arbor who is both hero and villain is that he never stops long enough to consider all the ramifications of his actions.
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