WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

jmcgurn As I gay man, I really liked this film. A more positive vision for at least a few of the characters would have made the movie better. But the acting is very good and violence against gay men still exists today. I have to say that I did not have a problem with the relationship between Theo & Tim. I do not support pedophilia by any means(!), but at 14 ("almost fifteen"), Theo is sexually mature and not confused about his sexuality. He seduces Tim; Tim asks him to leave (4 times I think). I don't believe we know for a fact that Tim is a pedophile. It's only word of mouth from Theo's mother, so consider the source! Their scenes together are quite moving.Watch this film but beware, some of what you will see is very disturbing.

Gordon-11 This film is about the events that happen to several gay men around Clapham Common in 36 hours.Due to the enormous number of characters involved, the beginning of the film is a little slow. Once the scene is set, a lot of action kicks in. It touches upon a lot of aspects of gay culture, some of the unpleasant aspects are portrayed in a raw and almost disturbing manner. As others have commented, the scene where the 14 year old boy and the loner encounter at home is dramatic, tense and well acted. It is easily the most memorable scene of the whole film.This film is raw, brutal and depressing. It can certainly help to raise debates over anonymous sex, and raise awareness over the tragedy of gay bashing.

hesketh27 Good performances. OK - now wev'e got the only positive comment about this TV film out of the way, let's have a look. What the hell was the point of this? Populated by a group of unpleasant, unlikeable stereotypes, it really looked like something that would have been made 20 years ago. Cliché ridden and unrelentingly grim throughout, the gay characters were either predatory, seedy individuals or had serious repression/hang up or psychological problems. The sex and violence scenes were sensationalist to say the least. This was meant to be part of C4's marking of 40 years of the liberation of gay men from the previous institutionalised repression they had suffered in this country throughout history. There are gay men like the ones in the film, I sometimes meet them, but they certainly do not represent the majority. Nobody wanted to see a positive propaganda exercise about gays, but neither did we want to see this parade of sad / damaged individuals. Whatever happened to balance? A piece of TV that was thoroughly depressing and ultimately, totally pointless.

Martin Bradley The problem with Kevin Elyot's (writer) and Adrian Shergold's (director) boldly ambitious "Clapham Junction" is that it attempts to bite off so much more than it can possibly chew in just under two hours. Elyot goes for an epic structure in an intimate setting. At times it looks like he's trying to cram in forty years of gay sexual history into a night and day and it just doesn't work. I wish I could have liked it more because there is so much here to admire and spread over, maybe six weekly episodes, he might have got away with it but as it stands it just doesn't ring true. This may well be down to Elyot's reliance on coincidence. All the characters seem to be inter-related. Nothing wrong with that, you might say; it has worked as a backdrop to many splendid dramas in the past but you have to suspend quite a lot of disbelief when in a city the size of London with a sizeable gay population, all the gay characters keep bumping into each other in clubs, public toilets, on Clapham Common itself or at dinner parties or just in living across the street from each other. It's a banal plot device and you can't help feeling Elyot would have made his point a lot better if the stories hadn't been connected.Nor is Elyot particularly good at serving up dialogue that sounds believable or naturalistic. The characters either talk in sound-bites or are reduced to double-entendres. If he can get in a crass joke, he does and nobody comes out of it well. But at least he tries. There is hardly an aspect of gay life, (or of 'straight' society's reaction to it), that he leaves unexplored. He even gives us the self-loathing bit of gay trade who beats up his pick-up for the night, (and later gets beaten up himself), and the film's most successful story is the one between the pedophile and the fourteen year old boy who worships him, (this only let down by casting a twenty-three year old actor as the boy).It is also very unevenly acted. There may be an in-joke of sorts in casting James Wilby and Rupert Graves, (the lovers from "Maurice"), Wilby as a closeted married man and Graves as an out and aging queen he eyes up in a toilet and later meets at a dinner party. Perhaps if these parts had been better written neither actor would have looked so foolish. The best performances come from Jospeh Mawle and Luke Tredaway as the pedophile and the boy and it's very much to their credit that they lift a very difficult subject and make it moving and oddly romantic. Detractors will, of course, find this story the most objectionable for obvious reasons although the producers have cushioned the blow by casting the obviously older Tredaway as the boy.The film itself takes as its basis the real-life murder of Jody Dobrowski on Clapham Common in 2005 but the impact is weakened by the episodic structure. Ultimately "Clapham Junction" is neither fish nor fowl but an unwieldy hybrid. Its heart may be in the right place but you can't help but feel it does its subject, (whatever you take its subject to be), something of an injustice.