Tom Jennings's blog

Rather than glamourising, demonising or stereotyping ghetto criminals, this carefully crafted ensemble drama projects anti-social labelling back onto those with power and wealth

This bewitching imaginary of symbolic expression and obscene realism has far more depth than your average TV police drama.

A rare cinema fiction tackling radical environmentalism ties itself in knots trying to offer a 'balanced' argument

This elegy to the gains for ordinary people made in the UK after 1945 – now largely clawed back – fails to inspire due to its lack of analysis of what went wrong.

Exemplary engaged film-making and an award-winning account of faltering attempts to turn around apparently implacable inner-city negativity.

Despite wilful ignorance, gross error and prejudicial omission, this 'full-blooded' film entertainment speaks volumes about the hurt and rage of injuries past and present as well as the yearning for renewal.

Tom Jennings considers the new softcore torture porn entertaining justifications of crimes against humanity in the name of its greater good.

Official 'truth' being more dishonest as well as stranger than fiction, Tom Jennings looks instead at feral youth fairytales screened since last August's riots.

A welcome and invaluable critical analysis of some of the effects of the genre on its viewers.

Two decades-worth of British poverty porn reveals more than might be thought.

“Rhyming for a reason, we ain’t here for the hell of it: Fuck ya deficit!” (Efeks, ‘Mass Production’)

Never mind the prissy costume drama bollocks. This raw punk historicism is a landmark, in several senses, of British cinema.

Yet another teenage gang tall story glimpses beyond the moral panics and tired miserabilism of most poverty porn.

An apparently refreshing take on underclass alienation soon sours into the same old rancid reaction

A naff cultural-historical hip-hop gospel packaged according to MTV aesthetics ...

Adam Curtis’ challenge to domination by computer systems asks questions the mainstream media – and the Left – typically avoid.

A disappointingly missed opporunity to explore recent developments in the military-industrial complex.

A rare example of television fiction doing some outrageous justice to the modern work/life (im)balance

This tale of disaffected youth trades in traditional rhetorical flourishes but succeeds in avoiding easy answers.

An unusually lucid, lurid costume drama goes straight for Victorian hypocrisy’s jugular ... Too straight, perhaps?