Rocks

The Florida Project (British Edition).

Authentic, contemporary drama with some very credible and moving performances from the young cast

Rocks is a familiar tale, but its quiet, composed, observational style is welcome and effective.

This is a good film about a teenage girl in London who finds herself having to take care of her and her brother after her mum walks out on them. It's like a celebration of diverse black street culture, with lots of energy, music and the like featured, plus scenes showing relatives in the flat, celebrating their culture. I thought the main performance was well done and it has a nice vibrancy to it, while also having the look of a documentary film - it felt pretty real/authentic, which is good.

While this feels like an overly familiar tale at this point, it is still not a story that has reached its use-by date; this version is flavoured by a near-documentary level of spontaneous performances by its cast, headed by Bakray who brings an implacable grit and determination to the title character. Manages to avoid any wallow in doom and gloom and while there are some emotional highs and lows, the faintly optimistic tone by the finale is definitely more than welcome.

'Girlhood' meets 'Skam'.

When you have a Netflix movie with an average tier of 7.83, it's probably worth a watch. I'd say the description of the film here on Criticker is spot on. One part Mid 90s, one part The Florida Project, two or three parts its own thing.

Hard not to compare it to Sciamma's Girlhood, both for the topic and for the collaborative, chaotic feel of it, but there's room for far more than one film like that and Rocks (both the character and the film) has a very non-sensationalist feel to it - yes, it feels like life or death, but also so grounded in lived experience that you know it's probably going to be life, in all its messiness.

Does a really good job of getting into the chaos of a modern high school with people of vastly different backgrounds, and pointing out issues only immigrants will face. Changes and life moving on are inevitable, whether we like it or not, so might as well embrace it.