When it comes to bad-ass cockney cool, one geezer stands head and shoulders above the rest; that man is Michael Caine. Daniel Barber’s debut feature film, Harry Brown, finds Sir Michael wheezing away as the titular Harry, a newly widowed septuagenarian and ex-green beret who is driven to revenge after the murder of a friend.

The film traverses the fine line between vengeance driven action-thriller and conservative revenge fantasy with copious swearing and black humour to boot. From its gritty handheld opening – that sets up key narrative and stylistic elements – through to a finale that would make Tarantino proud, the film oozes a unique and evolving aesthetic. The actors cast to fill out the ensemble of chavs, dealers and white trash couldn’t be more authentic and one particular scene set in a dealer’s ‘pad’ is so grimy in both tone and texture it leaves the viewer in desperate need of a shower.

What fills all this style with substance is Caine’s mesmerising performance – layering the anger which fuels his vengeance quest with grief, pathos and the emotional weight that only comes with age and a hard life well lived. Though finely supported by Emily Mortimer and Charlie Creed-Miles as the inspectors investigating the escalating violence, the film well and truly belongs to Caine. As he methodically cleanses the social malignancy that has spread over his neighbourhood you cannot help but cheer him on and be constantly reminded why Michael Caine has a Sir up front.

Colin (Winstone) has just found out his wife (Joanne Whalley) has been having it off with a French waiter (Melvil Poupaud). After quite convincingly trashing his own home, Colin collapses into a self-pitying, drunken stupor and it is up to his mates to pull him out. However his mates happen to be a bunch of foul-mouthed crooks and thieves and what follows is a very theatrical (and very coarse language driven) debate about what to do about the lover-boy now locked in the closet.

44 Inch Chest, from the writers of Sexy Beast, plays out almost entirely in one room and the plot sways between darkly comic and dangerously tense with Colin’s decisions sitting delicately in the middle. However it is not the setting that makes the film so engaging, but rather the company it keeps. The cast almost take turns at trying to steal the show from each other – be it Ian McShane, as Meredith, delivering a monologue on his sexual fantasies about Oliver Reed; or John Hurt, as the delightfully named Old Man Peanut, inserting the c-word in every sentence through a comical set of dentures. Even the less showy characters of Archie (Wilkinson) and Mal (Stephen Dilliane) are given plenty of meaty dialogue to throw back and forth. A rough, raucous and dark film, 44 Inch Chest is the most fun you can have with five gangsters, a dank room and a man locked in a wardrobe.