Beats (UK)

…goes beyond the social realism so prevalent in British film, to capture the immediacy and euphoria of 1990s rave culture.

Welsh has delivered a compelling snapshot of an era and captured a moment in life when friendship is at its most sustaining.

Beats is a simple structure, loaded with detail, dialogue and situations that only a writer who lived it could have conjured up.

Beats doesn't have anything more to say than previous films about dance culture, but with a visual style of its own and excellent music choices, it's a fitting tribute to an era etched in the memory of anyone old enough to have attended.

The script, adapted by Welsh and Kieran Hurley from Hurley's play, is especially good on the preciousness and subjectivity of cultural experience.

It's miraculously authentic - the pill-popping centrepiece is the heavenly answer to the LSD hell of Gaspar Noé's 'Climax'.

Beats brilliantly captures the nervy, joyful terror of turning up at a derelict warehouse equipped with a soundsystem and woefully inadequate toilet facilities.

Beats proceeds to give a dying scene its euphoric due, in a dazzling digression from stage-based form.

Compared with Mia Hansen-Løve’s resonant French house drama Eden, or Michael Winterbottom’s kaleidoscopic 24 Hour Party People, these beats sound tinny.

An infectiously enjoyable slice of knockabout nostalgia that wears its Trainspotting heritage proudly on its rough-edged tartan sleeve.

Beats is a truly heartfelt rites-of-passage tale — an immersive, intoxicating portrayal of the rave scene at its peak.