20 Essential Coming Of Age Movies That Changed Your Life

2. This Is England

Just as Noah Boambach took audiences back to New York in the 80s to show us a semi-autobiographical insight into the break up of a marriage and how this affected the children, so too does British filmmaker Shane Meadows return to his own childhood in that decade, resulting in an altogether different kind of movie: This Is England. Thomas Turgoose stars as Shaun Field (an obvious variation on Shane Meadows), a young boy whose father was killed during the Falklands War who joins up with a group of skinheads, only to find them taken over by an older man by the name of Combo, who begins to espouse racist and nationalistic views while showing an increasingly sociopathic tendency. Fusing eclectic music of the era such as ska and reggae - itself a reflection of how one subculture borrows from another - with astutely observed political and social commentary, This is England is by turns both bleak and amusing and never short of insightful.