听 User Rating 
Punters expecting a biopic of the bad-boy Oasis singer will be disappointed by this 主播大秀-funded drama, which takes a gritty look at working class life in 1930s Liverpool. If you've seen "Angela's Ashes" you'll have some idea what to expect from Stephen Frears' film, which couldn't be more different from his last picture, the John Cusack comedy "High Fidelity".
Liam (the cherubic Anthony Borrows) is a seven-year-old boy whose life takes a dramatic turn when his father (Ian Hart) loses his job at the local shipyard. To make ends meet, Liam's sister Teresa (Megan Burns) becomes a housemaid for the rich Jewish family who own the shipyard, further fuelling her father's bitterness.
While their mother (Claire Hackett) fights to hold her family together, Dad finds an outlet for his anger and frustration by joining the local Fascist party. Teresa, meanwhile, finds herself an unwilling participant in her employer's adulterous affair.
Poverty, Catholicism, and childhood make a potent mix - just ask Frank McCourt - but writer Jimmy McGovern avoids easy sentiment by investing his story with an almost documentary-style veracity. (You can almost smell the cabbage boiling on the stove and the starch in Hart's shirts.)
Unfortunately, this commendable restraint is undone by an unnecessarily melodramatic climax that belongs in another film altogether. Still, Frears deserves praise for drawing such resonant performances from the younger members of his cast, while Anne Reid steals the show as the Bible-bashing schoolmarm who takes a perverse pleasure in terrorising the little tykes in her charge.
