Movies like Riff-Raff

It’s a lean social-realism comedy-drama that watches a working-class man try to piece a life back together after prison. The film opens in a narrow social landscape: a London construction site where labour is informal, names are traded for paycheques, and housing is improvised in council blocks. That factual frame — post-incarceration reintegration, workplace precarity and housing insecurity — is the film’s engine, and it privileges close observation over tidy resolution. The narrative’s economy puts attention on small exchanges: a co-worker who offers a mattress, a landlord who looks the other way, a singer rehearsing rooms away. These elements are described plainly on screen, and the movie's strength is how they accumulate into moral pressure rather than plot twists. Stylistically it reads as workaday cinema: handheld compositions, a measured pacing and a muted, slightly grainy texture that keeps the eye near faces and palms. The camera favors informal proximity and gives the performances a lived-in immediacy rather than theatrical flourish. Where the picture is most interesting is in its tonal balancing act — the screenplay lets moments of dry humour sit beside melancholic stasis, so sympathy for the lead never becomes sentimental. The film’s social critique is local and specific: it ties benefit-office procedures, alias-driven labour practices, and squatted council housing into a portrait of systemic precarity. That focus makes the film feel deliberate and honest rather than performatively angry; it asks the viewer to attend to ordinary solidarity as a political fact.