Loach crafts pictures about overlooked, ordinary people; his
sensitive, scholastic eye finds potential for a grim, awkward beauty
in the humblest situations. Since his epochal 1960s BBC films, Up The
Junction and Cathy Come Home, he has lent more a sympathetic ear than a
dogmatically socialist voice to the struggles of the working class,
and resists the temptation to romanticise his subjects. His
underlying austerity can make for tough viewing, but it is a price worth
paying for his disavowal of all things slick or facile, and for showing
us a Britain which would otherwise be ignored.
