Urchin

11/7/2025

“Mike” (Frank Dillane) isn’t a bad man, he’s just an addict, down on his luck and living on the streets of an unforgiving London. The social services manage to find him a room in an hostel and even a job washing dishes at an hotel restaurant, but his path to the straight and narrow is anything but yellow-bricked and with temptation never far away and his frustrations made worse by his new relationship with a colleague who only seems to manage to make matters worse, things are not looking rosy. What might he do to escape this self-perpetuating cycle? Now this is not a film that offers us solutions. Nor does it move along sharpishly. It is more of a fly-on-the-wall observation of a young, vaguely charismatic, man who is trapped in a maelstrom of his own, and of a complicit society’s, making.

12/30/2025

Homelessness and drug addiction are serious social and public health issues that have no easy answers, especially for those experiencing them. Moreover, despite compassion-based government and charitable programs aimed at addressing these problems, many in society at large are unsympathetic to those seeking to overcome these circumstances, making their recovery doubly difficult. Winning over supporters to these causes can thus be an uphill battle, but one way of doing so is depicting the harrowing challenges that the afflicted undergo on a daily basis. And this is where the directorial debut from actor Harris Dickinson could have made an impact, but, sadly, it misses the mark. The film tells the story of Mike (Frank Dillane), a recovering addict who did time for assaulting and robbing a wo