bernarddaly I am amazed at the lack of knowledge displayed by the previous reviewer. I first saw this film in the 90s and watched it again last night. I was part of this general scene in southern England at that time and I have to say that the music, dancing and fashions are completely accurate. This nonsense about Afros and flares, that belonged in the early 70s, by 77 all that had changed. And yes, punks and soul boys were mixing in the clubs, fashions crossed over even earlier, the plastic "jelly" sandals and winkle picker shoes, all adopted from the punks in late 76/77.If anybody had walked in with flares there would have been howls of laughter.

preppy-3 I caught this way back in 1991 at an art house. I had no idea what it was about but the gay papers were advertising it to a ridiculous degree. I thought it might be about gay men in London but it wasn't. It was about a bunch of largely uninteresting characters in the 1970s Britain. It threw in homosexuality, racism, murder...basically anything it could think of and ended up quite a mess. The plot kept veering all over the place never settling on a consistent tone. The acting was pretty bad too. There was however a hot male on male sex scene. Nothing explicit--it was mostly just a lot of kissing and no shots from the waist down. This was the only sequence that caught my attention and the only part that had any heat or passion. Aside from that this is a mess.

Theo Robertson Remember the 1966 movie BLOWUP ? That's the movie that claims to be a murder thriller but is nothing of the sort . YOUNG SOUL REBELS is basically the same , it starts with a murder in a park then spends most of its running time going out of its way not to be a murder thriller except for the last five minutes which reveals who the murderer is . I'm surprised anyone is still able to remember or care about the murder subplot by the end of the movie since it concentrates more on the soul club scene of the late 1970s . Worse it features several scenes of men kissing and in one scene there's something a lot worse than kissing going onBefore anyone goes running to the admin screaming that a raving homophobe has submitted a review let me point out that BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN has received massive critical acclaim ( Though it's unlikely to make more than 50 million dollars at the US box office ) so much for homophobia . What my main gripe the opening and closing scene revolves around a murder and very little in between has anything to do with the alleged main story . There is no main story as we see a rambling ill focused film concerning itself with the club scene of 1977 . Ironically enough there's no feel of time or place here and could easily be set in any part of Britain at any point during the last 30 years This is just another cheaply made British movie that was produced by people who have no desire to make movies for a mainstream audience . If they had decided to make a movie revolving around a murder in a park that would have been fine , ditto if they had decided to make a movie revolving around the London soul scene but seeing as they've tried to combine the two YOUNG SOUL REBELS is a failure while the scenes of homosexuality is totally alienating for the average cinema goer . At least BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN deserves credit for knowing what it is

Buck Aroo I saw this film shortly after it's release, and felt quite cheated. It's title and advertising gave me the impression that it would be about the black DJ sound systems and soul scene which was at it's height in England during the late '70s and early '80s. But this only took up a fraction of film time. Instead, I had to sit through a convoluted sub-plot featuring a murder mystery which appeared all of a sudden during the movie, a very gratuitous gay sex scene, and generally bad acting and direction. There were a few moments where the protagonists had brushes with the law, and I thought at last this film was going somewhere and would depict the racism of the justice system accurately. But this was not the case, and these scenes appeared to have been either badly written, or edited. And when one character deceides to carry out his own murder investigation, I found it laughable. I understand that no film can be 100% accurate when depicting an era or events around it, and that it should be entertaining to the viewer. But at least a good attempt should be made to get the basics right. For example, hardly any of the black male actors sported an afro hairstyle or wore flares, which would have been as common as a rainy day in London during 1977. Blacks mixing with Punks? I'm no sure about that. They would have considered a lot of Punks to be similar to the skinheads which carried out a lot of racist attacks at that time. Also another sex scene featuring Sophie Okenedo and Valentine Nonyela, was not handled well at all, and was certainly not as explicit as the previous gay sex scenes which says a lot about it's director. By trying to show that homosexuality in the black british community is opposed more than in the white, I feel is absolute nonsense. Homophobia has no colour preference, and being black, it's director Isaac Julien should know better really.