Review of Wild Bill

Gritty London-based crime and family drama, in which a rather deadbeat dad comes out of prison to find his two young sons living a precarious life in a tower-block council flat because their mum has abandoned them and moved to Spain with a new boyfriend. The dad is a hard man - the wild Bill of the title - but not much good for or at anything else, though he's not really a bad person. He tries to be a father to the boys, but they've been managing without him and are more than a little suspicious, except that they need him to pretend to be around or they'll be taken into care and split up.

There's a lot in this film, including the way that the authorities - even the ones that we think of as the good ones, like local authority social workers - manage the underclass. And the way that drug dealing looks like an attractive career option to kids with no other prospects. And how hard it is for ex-cons to move beyond their old circles when they come out.

It's from 2011, and the construction of the Olympic Village (where the older boy is working, illegally because he's too young) sets it at a precise moment in time. So does the mum going off to Spain, which couldn't happen post-Brexit. In every other respect it looks bang up to date...nothing else seems to make it dated, not the clothes or the phones.

Watched on Amazon Prime.