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Blitz review: Perilous trip into wartime underworld for the Blitz's Oliver Twist, writes BRIAN VINER
It felt downright eerie to leave the cinema on London's Southbank and see, across the Thames, the dome of St Paul's Cathedral - once the city's structural symbol of resistance against Hitler.
Single mum Rita (Saoirse Ronan) shares a terraced house with her nine-year-old son George (impressive newcomer Elliott Heffernan), and her dad Gerald (played by musician Paul Weller in his screen-acting debut). Nonetheless, McQueen still smartly subverts our expectations, evoking The Railway Children (1970) when George jumps aboard another train and befriends three young brothers who have done the same thing – only for tragedy to bring our own sentimental journey to a screeching halt. There are plainly deliberate echoes of Oliver Twist, too, when George is introduced by a kind of Nancy figure to this story’s version of Bill Sikes, played by Stephen Graham, with Kathy Burke as his grotesquely-painted partner-in-crime.
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