Freestyle

Anyone who hoped that Film London’s Microwave scheme (which offers London-based directors £100,000 to make a movie) might turn out to be the UK’s answer to Dogme – provoking bold innovation, experimentation and lateral thinking within film – will be sad to learn that with ‘Freestyle’ the dream is well and truly over. Ex-professional basketball player and journalist Kolton Lee offers his dizzyingly inept, ineffectual and condescending take on south-of-the-river urban life as Oxford-bound rich girl, Ondene (Lucy Stanhope) enters the world of freestyling (think keepie-uppie mixed with breakdancing while holding a basketball). Even as a no-nonsense genre exercise the film falls flat, with writer Michael Maynard capturing none of the texture, humour and drama of black, working-class street life. Shabbily filmed and poorly acted, its lone positive is a compellingly awful turn by Alfie (brother of Lily) Allen, whose bumbling, velour-tracksuited date-rapist is the sleaziest thing you’ll see this year.