Attack The Block strikes a refreshingly happy medium, neither demonising nor glorifying them. 
It clearly springs from real-life experience, after the 6ft 3in writer-director Joe Cornish, a middle-aged, public school-educated South Londoner, was annoyed and embarrassed to find himself mugged on his home turf by some 12 to 15-year-olds.
The film this event inspired starts off on bonfire night with impressive political incorrectness. 

Five Brixton hoodies — four of them black — mug a white nurse at knifepoint. Their all-too-common street-crime is interrupted by a more unusual event: an invader from outer-space crash-lands on a nearby car. 
The immediate reaction of the gang is to kill the interloper, which looks like an unappetising cross between Sepp Blatter and the beast that burst out of John Hurt’s chest in Alien. 
They then parade its corpse triumphantly around their council estate, and celebrate by sampling the wares of the local drug-dealer (Nick Frost) who operates from the 19th floor of their tower block, and fancies himself a naturalist because he watches so much telly.