GreenCine Daily - ”Better Things unfolds in photographic compositions rather than dramatic scenes,” writes the Observer’s Jason Solomons.
“It’s a painful portrait of a fractured Cotswolds community, though not the one on the postcards. [Duane] Hopkins’s version is a world of teenage heroin addicts shooting up and driving too fast down country lanes, and sad, elderly folk staring out of windows.”
“The drama takes place in the wake of a young woman’s heroin overdose, and most of the young characters are past or present users,” writes Jonathan Romney in the Independent. “Austere in the extreme, Better Things is shot in a vein (perhaps ‘vein’ isn’t the best word) of poetic realism, Hopkins displaying an intuitive knack for stitching together allusive chains of images. It’s certainly fated to be dismissed by some as the latest chapter in the history of British miserabilism, but Hopkins is a director with an introspective subtlety uncommon in UK filmmaking. Better Things proves the Brits can make Belgian art films as well as anyone - and I hope you realise that’s a compliment.”… [Full Story]















