"This annoyed me at the time - like Animal House - because it was not historical. It was smearing late seventies ideas of street credibility over sixties mod. I thought it very doubtful that a top face would be working at a scrap yard, for instance. But who cares? I've seen it many times since and it's an excellent teen movie: a great soundtrack, strong cast - a new generation of actors like Ray Winstone, Phil Davies, Mark Wingett and Phil Daniels, who would go on to have lustrous careers - and an archetypal loner-vs-the-gang storyline. It's noticeable that as Jimmy gets weirder, he gets more androgynous. As the film goes on, the activities of the gang get so tiresome you don't blame him for breaking away."

"Potemkin is taught in film schools worldwide, more like a fossil than a real, breathing animal that must be dissected. Watch it because it’s important. So budding filmmakers are taught about formalism and montage, and they rarely get to watch Eisenstein’s later works, like Ivan the Terrible. They’re missing out: imagine a biopic run through the meat grinder of German expressionism, with every image connoting the pitfalls of absolute power, with cutaways of faces that are thankfully forever captured in celluloid marble, with a sense of mounting state paranoia and ever-crumbling artifice. Potemkin may have the classic scenes, like the dish, the lion, the guns, but Ivan has taken all those early lessons and boyhood feints and given us a masterpiece."