A bold new entry in the long-standing British tradition of disquieting social realism. full review

The characters are guarded, and as we come to understand them scene by scene, they become ever harder to sort into convenient categories of hero and villain. full review

Writer-director Andrea Arnold, working in British lower-class realism, still finds wondrous moments of connection in Mia's life. full review

Writer-director Andrea Arnold has created something so real and raw, you may come away with a twinge of guilty voyeurism, a sense of peering too closely and impolitely into other people's lives. full review

The film swims in an anguish not solely the result of Mia's coming of age -- and yet, it surfaces for air in ways compelling and uncompromising. full review

To the script's credit, when the climax comes it feels inevitable yet surprising too -- that ideal combination. full review

In a year less crowded with new young talent, Katie Jarvis might now be getting fittings for her Oscar nomination dress. full review

Fish Tank digs around in its protagonist's psyche, unafraid to explore. It's oppressive and claustrophobic, confused and scary in there. But it's also compellingly real. full review

Watching Fish Tank is, as the title implies, like gazing through the glass of an aquarium at the lives of those trapped within, whose only chance of escape would seem to be through death and the indignity of being flushed down a toilet. full review

Unfolds as a conventional coming-of-age story, yet Andrea Arnold hasn't altered her persuasively jaundiced view of men, who seem as pitifully helpless against their horndog urges as the women foolish enough to care for them. full review

Jarvis, whom the director reportedly discovered at an Essex train station, is nothing less than a revelation in a performance that is tender, spiky and utterly fearless in its physical and emotional range. full review

A remarkable downer-upper paradox: a bruising tale of teenage resilience, honest and emotionally complicated and alive. full review

Arnold sees everything through Mia's eyes and never steps outside to explain things from any other point of view. She knows who the young girl is, and we are left to assume. full review

The brilliant power of the film comes from the gritty reality Arnold creates. full review

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. full review

Jarvis' debut performance is a bracingly authentic revelation. She was discovered by filmmakers in a train station as she fought with her boyfriend, and brings just the right blend of feisty forcefulness and awkward tenderness to the part. full review

With a bare minimum of dialogue - none of which I can print - Arnold establishes Mia's barren environment and the hope and fury that war beneath the surface of the girl's skin. full review

This is disturbing stuff, [but] unexpectedly hopeful in its outlook. full review

Fish Tank is a coming-of-age story for Mia, who will at least have a shot at happiness, and a coming-into-mastery story for the writer-director, Ms. Arnold, whose prospects seem limitless. full review

The contradictions of adolescence have rarely been conveyed with such authenticity and force.