PADDY Considine is being called the English Robert De Niro. He has that unpredictably, that threat of violence, that "Are you talking to me" tick. Conveniently, City Screen's programme schedule in York offers the chance to see Considine take the next step up the ladder in not one but two roles.

Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski's Yorkshire teenage romance My Summer Of Love is not Considine's film, being a story of two young girls discovering love, but his character looms large. He plays a hard-nut crook, who has taken on the messianic guise of a born-again Christian leader.

He has turned over his family's empty pub to prayer meetings, and he knows exactly what his teenage sister is doing this surprisingly golden Todmorden summer, playing with the posh public school totty up the road.

Mysterious mood set by the perfect choice of Alison Goldfrapp's woozy, heavenly yet fragile music, Mona (Natalie Press) is an inquisitive Puck spirit, who dabbles in back-of-the-car sex and dreams of more beyond her impoverished circumstances.

Tamsin (Emily Blunt) has looks, a horse, breeding, a gift for the cello. On befriending the impressionable Mona, she talks of Edith Piaf's tragic life and Nietzsche's philosophy in that way teenagers do. Whereas Mona sees through her brother, branding him a fake, she is utterly hooked on Tamsin and her tales of her anorexic sister's tragic death.

They are inseparable; taboo love blossoms in the manner of Heavenly Creatures, yet all the while trouble is brewing and Considine is brooding. This is a hypnotic, subtle, intelligent drama, character-driven as British films once were, with engrossing dialogue and a remarkable chemistry between Blunt and Press and Considine too.

Considine boils over in Dead Man's Shoes, a latterday Jacobean revenge drama from the Midlands director Shane Meadows, who for too long has been tagged Britain's next great director without matching the hype.

As with My Summer Of Love, the setting is a village stuck in time, this one in the Midlands, where Herbie, Tuff, Sonny and Soz's world of incompetent drug-dealing, porno movies and kettle-boiled meals is about to end.

Ex-squaddie Considine is a revenging angel for his brother, and one by one he takes out those guilty for his death in the style of a low-budget Western.

Grainy as an old photo, dark as peat, this is Meadows' most serious work, with Considine contributing both a harrowing lead turn and a co-writing credit. One problem; Meadows is still better at ideas than execution: he is no Martin Scorsese.

Updated: 09:48 Friday, October 22, 2004