Neds

In Glasgow in the seventies, John is quiet and does well at school, and his older brother's gang history both protects and marks him. Teachers file him according to his class, there is violence at home, and at some point he makes his own choice: fighting is easier. Peter Mullan wrote it out of his own childhood and neither romanticises the violence nor judges it from outside; he shows how the system pushes the boy that way by degrees. Conor McCarron, a non-professional, takes the lead in his first film. Mullan plays the father himself. The hallucination sequence at the end is contested and it is where the film's anger gathers. Who it is for: viewers who like Scottish social realism and films about youth violence. Who it is not for: anyone who needs distance from hard violence and hopeless endings.