Urban Hymn

Good intentions can't keep this stab at social realism from descending into maudlin melodrama. Set around the 2011 riots that began in Tottenham, north London, black teenagers Jamie (Letitia Wright) and Leanne (Isabella Laughland) play friends raised in a care home who drift apart after social worker Kate (Shirley Henderson) invites Jamie to join her community choir. From there, the girl's confidence grows and she applies for a music scholarship, but the script from St Trinian's writer Nick Moorcroft is detached from the harsher realities of London life and its surfeit of clichés and caricatures make it more implausible with each dismayingly predictable development. Henderson exudes a simpering liberal compassion better suited to theory than practice (and regarded with scepticism by husband Steven Mackintosh) and while Laughland seethes with indignation, Wright struggles to convey her past hurt or future potential. For his first feature in a decade after Basic Instinct 2, Michael Caton-Jones directs steadily but without much soul.