Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011)

A former CIA agent trains his daughter to become an assassin as they hide out in a log cabin in the Arctic Circle.

Here's another teenage girl with problems but unlike Fish Tank's Mia the problems are slightly more fantastical than winning a dance competition or falling in love with her mother's boyfriend.

Saoirse Ronan plays assassin Hanna, a ghostly-looking teenage girl, who we first meet killing a moose in the snowy wastes. Eric Bana plays her father Erik Heller, a rogue CIA agent on the most-wanted list since losing his German wife Johanna.

Cate Blanchett plays the villain Marissa Wiegler, an over-the-top CIA agent obsessed with oral hygiene, in a similar vein to her turn as an OTT KGB agent in the last Indiana Jones film. She wants Hanna and her dad terminated with extreme prejudice, as these assassin types always say. Tom Hollander puts in an hilariously camp turn as the sadistic Isaacs, a German nightclub owner with bleached blonde-hair and euro trash clothes, flanked by two skinheads with bomber jackets and DMs.

Is this film a fairy story dressed up as a spy thriller or a spy thriller in the style of a fairy tale? The film’s beginning is straight out of the Brothers Grimm with a fairy-tale cottage in the forest where a huntsman and his daughter live undisturbed by the outside world. Or they did until they turn on the GPS tracker so Cate Blanchett can begin hunting them down.

Like the average Bond film the action travels about a fair bit from Arctic Finland to Morocco to Germany though no Bond film I ever saw had 007 hiding out in a VW camper van with a family of Bowie-singing hippies. (Perhaps Daniel Craig should give it a go in the next one...) There's even time for some half-baked exposition about altered DNA and super assassins along the way too.

If it sounds like the proverbial curate’s egg in many ways it is but remarkably the film works which is in no small way due to Joe Wright's solid confident direction. The Chemical Brothers provide a throbbing kinetic soundtrack and the actors manage to keep straight faces throughout.

Although Hanna has a plot that strains at credibility it is a film that looks great and has style in abundance as befits the director of Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Atonement. (Like both those films it features a bravura Steadicam sequence filmed in one take - here Eric Bana enters a Berlin subway station followed closely by a few of Marissa's agents.)

It’s no classic certainly but this brilliant slice of nonsense is worth two hours of anyone’s time.

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

A 15 year-old girl, Mia, lives in Essex with her sister and single mother in a council flat when an Irish security guard called Connor comes into their lives.

Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank evokes the naturalism of Ken Loach’s classic Kes updated to modern day Essex. Mia, played by Katie Jarvis in her first role, is an angry out-of-control teenager excluded from school and waiting to be moved to a “special school”. The first time we see her she abuses another group of teenage girls practising a dance routine in the street, head-butting one and breaking her nose, for no real reason. But underneath all her bravado and swearing lies a scared and vulnerable child trying too hard to grow up fast.

Mia needs something to cling to in order to transcend her everyday drab surroundings. In Kes Billy Casper finds some redemption through training the kestrel. In Fish Tank Mia doesn’t find redemption although she tries to free an old horse from the gypsy encampment thinking (wrongly) that it’s being abused. Mia’s only possible escape comes from secretly practising hip-hop dancing alone in an empty flat dreaming of stardom. Her mother brings home a new boyfriend, Connor, played by Michael Fassbender who befriends her and encourages her dancing aspirations.

It’s almost hard to believe that Katie Jarvis, discovered by the casting director arguing with her boyfriend at Tilbury Town railway station, hadn’t acted before as she is truly mesmerising as Mia. Michael Fassbender is, in roles like this one and in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, steadily becoming one of the best actors of his generation.

Andrea Arnold, writing and directing, has beautifully illuminated that section of society that you don’t often see on film in anything but the most negative terms. If you took much of the output of British cinema as a barometer of the country you’d imagine it was some vast heritage site full of stately houses and vapid grasping yuppies.

The recent inner-city riots and books such as Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones have pushed the debate back again onto the front pages and the front benches of Parliament. What do we do about the generations of the disenfranchised and marginalised who have never worked for a living? Do they have rich inner lives that the middle classes are unaware of? Or do they just want to get wasted and watch reality TV? Would reading a few books help? Is the breakdown of family the real reason that a whole generation of children and young adults live their lives without hope?

A film like Fish Tank certainly forms part of this debate, though it’s not some heart-warming didactic tract about hugging a hoodie. It’s an enjoyable and sometimes heartbreaking film about a young girl trying to make sense of her world which luckily for a lot of people is a world they never have to see unless it’s in a film like this or exploding onto the evening news.