Although there's an autobiographical element to Shane Meadows's 1980s saga This Is England, it's tempting to suggest that this powderkeg of a picture might have been even more effective had it been set in the present, as its ideas on crumbling communities, racial integration, detached governments and disaffected youth are particularly relevant to the last days of Blair's Britain. But, by staging the action in the Thatcher era, Meadows somehow diffuses the combustible issues he raises and makes them seem like temporary aberrations on the part of a right-thinking nation rather than the perpetuation of pernicious attitudes that have been common to all classes for decades.

Striving to sustain the kitchen sink tradition that has dominated British cinema since the late 1950s, Meadows may not be this country's most original film-maker. But the Uttoxeter auteur is certainly one of the most uncompromising. Moreover, he has a knack of coaxing natural performances out of young kids that an Italian neo-realist would envy. Andrew Shim excelled in the title role of A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) and he returns here to give courageous display of conflicted loyalty as a black kid in a rundown seaside town who joins a skinhead gang because there's nothing better to do. But he's upstaged by Thomas Turgoose, who is chillingly convincing as the grieving son of a Falklands veteran, who rejects the scally cameraderie of Joe Gilgun and his skin cronies to follow jailbird Stephen Graham into the National Front.

This isn't the first time that Meadows has explored the subject of surrogate fatherhood. But there's nothing benevolent about Graham's paternalism and his latent menace contrasts sharply with the dopey geniality of Gilgun and the Boy George-loving Rosamund Hanson (who gives the tweenage Turgoose his first snog). Indeed, the pitiless brutality of our fascist underclass hasn't been captured this viscerally since Alan Clarke's Scum (1980). Yet, almost inevitably, Meadows opts to end on a positive note. But it leaves an unnease similar to that at the end of a horror movie, in which you just know that the monster hasn't really been slain.

The debuting Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck concludes The Lives of Others in much the same way. But this surprise Oscar winner lacks the air of terrifying authenticity that makes This Is England so much more than a nightmarish memoir of a best-forgotten time. The suspicion and paranoia that infested East German society for over 40 years couldn't have been more meticulously recreated. However, this care deprives the action of the rough edges required to leave an indelible impression.

Rather clumsily set in 1984 (in case we miss the Orwellian overtones), there's something Frederick Forsyth about the attempt of culture minister Thomas Thieme to use the Stasi to incriminate acclaimed playwright Sebastian Koch, so that he can seduce his actress girlfriend, Marina Gedeck. But, this is merely the MacGuffin that sets implacable agent Ulrich Mühe on the road to redemption, as by eavesdropping on the subversive conversations of Koch and his circle, he comes to question his loyalty to a party that can allow corrupt imbeciles like Thieme and his old school friend Ulrich Tukur to attain power.

Expertly played, this is an intriguing and often gripping film. But it works best as a disconcerting thriller rather than a history lesson, as it lacks the intellectual rigour to match such recent flashbacks into the nefarious German past as Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005). Moreover, its suggestion that there were good Stasi - just as there had been good Nazis - feels like something imported from a patronising piece of Hollywood propaganda rather than a considered point in a sober study of an agency that boasted 100,000 employees and 200,000 informers. Much has been made of how The Lives of Others corrects the superficially nostalgic satire of Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). But this is every bit as watchably glib, as it's little more than a reworking of Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire (1988), in which a guardian angel wishes he could become as vulnerably human as those he protects.