Fish Tank (2009)
Everything changes for 15-year-old Mia when her mum brings home a new boyfriend.
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Possibly the most unorthodox choice of the films in my all-time top ten, but to me, this film perfectly captures the feelings that one experiences as a teenager, from "I just want to get out of this town," to "all I really want to do is insert passion." For Mia, it's dance, and for me, it was film... so in a sense, Fish Tank is almost like a meta-film in my eyes, because it's a movie about adolescent passions, and mine was (and still is) cinema. As soon as I reached the point in the film during which Nas' Life's a Bitch cropped up - one of my favorite songs by my single favorite rapper - I knew that I…

Set out to make you miserable from the starting block, Fish Tank managed to make me feel elated, depressed, angry and above all impressed. It's just that good.

Bleak and distressing films, when done right, often provoke in me a sense of unease, a sense of awareness of bad things always lurking around the corner. I'm a fairly positive person, but am always weary when things are going well. I'm always on the look out, perhaps even waiting for things to go wrong. I'm fully aware that this is an unmistakable self fulfilling prophecy, but it's just something I carry with me and can't switch off.

To say that I connected to Mia, Fish Tank's amazing protagonist, is an understatement.…

What's worse than a hopeless life is a life with false hope, and Fish Tank is the vivid, soul shattering proof of that.

In Fish Tank, Mia, a teenage girl from a poor, dysfunctional British family, comes of age with grace and pride, despite the hardballs life keeps throwing at her. It's a microscopic, ultra realistic insight into the lives of the underrepresented, with every spotlight shone on the vessel of Mia, who struggles dealing with a neglecting mother, a misplaced crush that ends horribly, and her passion for hip hop dance and music as an escape. It's a hugely empathetic, heartfelt experience, thanks to a refreshingly raw debut performance from Katie Jarvis. Emotion flows under an unassuming plot that…