Down Terrace

The British do kitchen-sink realism extremely well; they also have a nice way with black comedy. It's rare, however, to see the two as wickedly combined as they are in Down Terrace.

A low-budget effort by British director Ben Wheatley, Down Terrace is an enjoyably nasty piece of business about a down-market sort of underworld clan.

A dark and hilarious thwomping of the whole miserablist British gangster genre.

Its litany of outrageous abuses and horrible crimes, as it careens from delicately phrased dinner-table insults to old ladies murdered in the street, is often gaspingly, ridiculously funny.

A grimly amusing portrait of a closed system in which the pressure is building to an explosion.

Down Terrace is the auspicious feature debut of Ben Wheatley, who's spent a decade directing sitcoms, Web-isodes and commercials while fruitlessly pitching scripts to Hollywood.

[Julia Deakin's] Ma Barker role (and performance) is essential to the film's grotesque yet enthralling familial fatalism.

This is the sort of thing you'd expect if the Coen Brothers were British and they decided to do their own version of a "Sopranos" movie set in Brighton, England.

Has some poignant moments but gets lost along the way in the macabre.

The junior Hill's script, written with director Wheatley, very deliberately considers the abilities of each of its elements, from the inanimate to the human, and uses each to their best effect.

Chances are you've never seen a crime family like the one in Ben Wheatley's unusual, ferociously witty dark comedy Down Terrace.

Doesn't provide much of an electric charge until very late in the game, making the first two acts of the picture an incredible test of endurance for anyone not utterly devoted to the throttled fury of British kitchen sink dramas.