Gypo (15) <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

The week's other tale of misery on the south coast is the first UK feature to be made under the Dogme 95 aegis, the code of film-making that outlaws props, artificial lighting, music and anything else that hints at forethought. Jan Dunn's film also owes a debt to Pavel Pawlikowski's Last Resort in its compassionate portrait of asylum seekers in Margate, a town whose desolate gaudiness is now in serious need of a PR campaign.

Pauline McLynn plays long-suffering Helen, with a racist brute for a husband (Paul McGann) and a teenage daughter who's landed her with the care of her own infant. Helen seeks solace in night classes and the friendship of a young Romany Czech student (Chloe Sirene) and her mother, both on the run from family traumas back in the old country. Told from three different perspectives, the film piles up despair that threatens to topple into bathos, yet the performances of McLynn, newcomer Sirene and Rula Lenska keep you on its side.