Thomas Turgoose gave one of the most astonishing performances of any young British actor in recent times when playing a teeny skinhead in Shane Meadows�s This is England. The pair team up again for Somers Town, another coming of age tale.

Star rating ***
Dir: Shane Meadows
With: Thomas Turgoose, Piotr Jagiello, Kate Dickie

Thomas Turgoose gave one of the most astonishing performances of any young British actor in recent times when playing a teeny skinhead in Shane Meadows's This is England. The pair team up again for Somers Town, another coming of age tale. While a more lightweight piece, the winner of the Michael Powell award for best British film at this year's Edinburgh festival has enough moments to confirm Turgoose as a genuine talent and Meadows as the director who gets the best out of him.

Turgoose, 16 now, plays Tomo, a northern lad fresh off the train to London with nothing but a big bag and a little cheek. For a time the only friendly face he meets belongs to fellow exile Jane, played by Scots actress Kate Dickie. Winding up in the north London council estate of the title he befriends Marek, a Polish teenager whose dad is helping to build the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras.

You'll hear a lot about Euro-star in Somers Town, its place in the action guaranteed by the company's funding of what was initially meant to be a short. Though extended to a feature length 75 minutes, the project's origins show at times in the thinness of the material. This is less a rounded movie with something to say and places to go than a collection of handsomely crafted scenes.

By shooting almost entirely in black and white, Meadows aims to give the picture a gritty, kitchen sink drama feel, yet he also wants to put Turgoose's comic talents on display. The marriage of tones is not always a happy one, with the humour rather laboured in parts. Turgoose, however, plays a blinder throughout. The kid is a born (Euro)star.