British director Ken Loach has always had his finger on the pulse of his country’s simmering socioeconomic situation, especially when it concerns the plight of the working class. It’s no surprise, then, that for his latest feature — the 27th for the 86-year-old filmmaker, who made his first movie, Poor Cow, all the way back in 1967 — he’s decided to tackle two issues not only at the forefront of U.K. politics, but most of Europe and the U.S. as well.
Compassionate if a bit schematic at times, The Old Oak is a ripped-from-the-headlines story about Syrian refugees arriving in a failing blue-collar town in northern England, and the anger it provokes among certain residents looking for a scapegoat to pin their problems on. You could make virtually the same movie about Central Americans arriving in Texas, or Sub-Saharan Africans arriving in France, so much are immigration and...
Compassionate if a bit schematic at times, The Old Oak is a ripped-from-the-headlines story about Syrian refugees arriving in a failing blue-collar town in northern England, and the anger it provokes among certain residents looking for a scapegoat to pin their problems on. You could make virtually the same movie about Central Americans arriving in Texas, or Sub-Saharan Africans arriving in France, so much are immigration and...
- 5/26/2023
- by Jordan Mintzer
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
One of the major figures at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Academy Award-nominated “Call Me By Your Name” director Luca Guadagnino will serve as president of the main competition official jury at Spain’s 68th San Sebastian Festival.
The announcement comes as Guadagnino world premieres two films at Venice: the doc feature “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams,” about extraordinary Italian luxury shoe designer-entrepreneur Salvatore Ferragamo, and a more personal 122-minute short “Fiori, Fiori, Fiori,” in which Guadagnino looks up childhood friends to see how they’re faring during Covid-19.
At San Sebastian, Guadagnino will also be on double duty as he will also present out of the competition the world premiere of his series “We Are What We Are,” an HBO/Sky Italia production sold by Fremantle.
Acclaimed for his often glamorous movies directed with a high-style, and set in glorious locations and featuring marvelous houses – Guadagnino nevertheless maintains he has no style,...
The announcement comes as Guadagnino world premieres two films at Venice: the doc feature “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams,” about extraordinary Italian luxury shoe designer-entrepreneur Salvatore Ferragamo, and a more personal 122-minute short “Fiori, Fiori, Fiori,” in which Guadagnino looks up childhood friends to see how they’re faring during Covid-19.
At San Sebastian, Guadagnino will also be on double duty as he will also present out of the competition the world premiere of his series “We Are What We Are,” an HBO/Sky Italia production sold by Fremantle.
Acclaimed for his often glamorous movies directed with a high-style, and set in glorious locations and featuring marvelous houses – Guadagnino nevertheless maintains he has no style,...
- 9/4/2020
- by John Hopewell
- Variety Film + TV
or, Savant picks The Most Impressive Discs of 2015
This is the actual view from Savant Central, looking due North.
What a year! I was able to take one very nice trip back East too see Washington D.C. for the first time, or at least as much as two days' walking in the hot sun and then cool rain would allow. Back home in Los Angeles, we've had a year of extreme drought -- my lawn is looking patriotically ratty -- and we're expecting something called El Niño, that's supposed to be just shy of Old-Testament build-me-an-ark intensity. We withstood heat waves like those in Day the Earth Caught Fire, and now we'll get the storms part. This has been a wild year for DVD Savant, which is still a little unsettled. DVDtalk has been very patient and generous, and so have Stuart Galbraith & Joe Dante; so far everything...
This is the actual view from Savant Central, looking due North.
What a year! I was able to take one very nice trip back East too see Washington D.C. for the first time, or at least as much as two days' walking in the hot sun and then cool rain would allow. Back home in Los Angeles, we've had a year of extreme drought -- my lawn is looking patriotically ratty -- and we're expecting something called El Niño, that's supposed to be just shy of Old-Testament build-me-an-ark intensity. We withstood heat waves like those in Day the Earth Caught Fire, and now we'll get the storms part. This has been a wild year for DVD Savant, which is still a little unsettled. DVDtalk has been very patient and generous, and so have Stuart Galbraith & Joe Dante; so far everything...
- 12/15/2015
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Producer Rebecca O'Brien says Jimmy's Hall could be last feature film made in traditional way, 'shot on film, edited on film'
• Ken Loach puts out appeal for rare analogue editing tape
Help can sometimes be found in the most unlikely places. Ken Loach, the most indefatigable of old-school, social-conscience film directors, has had his plea for vital film-making supplies answered by the animation house Pixar, some 5,300 miles away just outside San Francisco.
What's all the more remarkable is that Pixar, the cutting-edge studio, which has revolutionised animation through the use of computers and digital technology, has supplied the British film-maker with hard-to-find, fast-disappearing equipment for traditional film editing, done the old fashioned way with celluloid and adhesive tape.
Loach, 77, is currently working on Jimmy's Hall, an Irish-set drama about a communist who returns to the country of his birth in the 1930s to reopen the dance hall he once ran.
• Ken Loach puts out appeal for rare analogue editing tape
Help can sometimes be found in the most unlikely places. Ken Loach, the most indefatigable of old-school, social-conscience film directors, has had his plea for vital film-making supplies answered by the animation house Pixar, some 5,300 miles away just outside San Francisco.
What's all the more remarkable is that Pixar, the cutting-edge studio, which has revolutionised animation through the use of computers and digital technology, has supplied the British film-maker with hard-to-find, fast-disappearing equipment for traditional film editing, done the old fashioned way with celluloid and adhesive tape.
Loach, 77, is currently working on Jimmy's Hall, an Irish-set drama about a communist who returns to the country of his birth in the 1930s to reopen the dance hall he once ran.
- 10/30/2013
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
Three Guatemalan teenagers' attempts to cross the murderous Mexico-us border region makes for gripping viewing
Even when Ken Loach doesn't have a film in competition in Cannes, his influence is still keenly felt. Spanish director Diego Quemada-Diez was a camera assistant on Loach's Carla's Song, Land and Freedom and Bread and Roses, and there is something very Loachian in this tough, absorbing, suspenseful drama showing in the Un Certain Regard section about three Guatemalan kids trying illegally to cross the Mexican border into the Us.
He has avowedly stuck to Loach's realist directing style: shooting in narrative sequence and using a semi-improvisatory approach on location. It is interesting that while British directors such as Andrea Arnold and Clio Barnard have hyper-evolved the Loach idiom into beautifully realised and photographed dramas of naturalism, Quemada-Diez is arguably closer to the gritty, grainy original.
The title comes from a Mexican ballad, Jaula de Oro,...
Even when Ken Loach doesn't have a film in competition in Cannes, his influence is still keenly felt. Spanish director Diego Quemada-Diez was a camera assistant on Loach's Carla's Song, Land and Freedom and Bread and Roses, and there is something very Loachian in this tough, absorbing, suspenseful drama showing in the Un Certain Regard section about three Guatemalan kids trying illegally to cross the Mexican border into the Us.
He has avowedly stuck to Loach's realist directing style: shooting in narrative sequence and using a semi-improvisatory approach on location. It is interesting that while British directors such as Andrea Arnold and Clio Barnard have hyper-evolved the Loach idiom into beautifully realised and photographed dramas of naturalism, Quemada-Diez is arguably closer to the gritty, grainy original.
The title comes from a Mexican ballad, Jaula de Oro,...
- 5/23/2013
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Sundance Selects has acquired the domestic rights to Ken Loach's "The Angels' Share" out of Cannes. The film chronicles Robbie, a Scottish youth trying to avoid prison. Robbie sneaks into a maternity hospital to visit his girlfriend and newborn son, an experience that further emphasizes the need to get his life in order. Loach directed from a script by frequent collaborator Paul Laverty. Laverty also penned the scripts for Loach projects like "Carla's Song," "Sweet Sixteen" and "The Wind That Shakes the Barley." Jonathan Sehring, President of SundanceSlects and IFC Films described the...
- 5/24/2012
- by Lucas Shaw
- The Wrap
Ken Loach's new film The Angels' Share is one of the big contenders at Cannes. Will its star – Glaswegian binman Gary Maitland – finally give up the day job?
Like many people, Gary Maitland juggles two jobs. For both, he must wake at 6.30am. But it's only when he's working as a movie star that he gets chauffeur-driven to work. South Lanarkshire council does not, as yet, extend this service to its binmen.
The Glaswegian's days of merely moonlighting on the big screen – he has already appeared in two Ken Loach films – look to be drawing to a close, though. This week, he will emerge into the limelight: his latest collaboration with Loach, The Angels' Share, is in competition at the Cannes film festival, and he will be there to promote it.
Maitland has been to France before, travelling through by coach to see Rangers play in the Netherlands. This...
Like many people, Gary Maitland juggles two jobs. For both, he must wake at 6.30am. But it's only when he's working as a movie star that he gets chauffeur-driven to work. South Lanarkshire council does not, as yet, extend this service to its binmen.
The Glaswegian's days of merely moonlighting on the big screen – he has already appeared in two Ken Loach films – look to be drawing to a close, though. This week, he will emerge into the limelight: his latest collaboration with Loach, The Angels' Share, is in competition at the Cannes film festival, and he will be there to promote it.
Maitland has been to France before, travelling through by coach to see Rangers play in the Netherlands. This...
- 5/15/2012
- by Catherine Shoard
- The Guardian - Film News
Ken Loach brings the horrors of the war in Iraq back home to Liverpool in this gripping conspiracy thriller
All films are political, though most unconsciously so. Along with a handful of others (one thinks of the great Soviet directors of the 1920s, of the Italians Francesco Rosi and Gillo Pontecorvo, of the American John Sayles), Ken Loach is that relatively rare figure, the consciously political film-maker. Only the occasional Loach film lacks some well-considered left-wing agenda, and Route Irish, his response to the war in Iraq, takes up themes he has pursued on several occasions, including crimes committed in the name of the state, the brutalisation of militarism, the exploitation of the demoralised unemployed and the thoughtless ill-treatment of native populations.
Scripted by his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty, Route Irish is a characteristic Loach film, a gripping conspiracy thriller not unlike Hidden Agenda, his film on the Troubles. Quite...
All films are political, though most unconsciously so. Along with a handful of others (one thinks of the great Soviet directors of the 1920s, of the Italians Francesco Rosi and Gillo Pontecorvo, of the American John Sayles), Ken Loach is that relatively rare figure, the consciously political film-maker. Only the occasional Loach film lacks some well-considered left-wing agenda, and Route Irish, his response to the war in Iraq, takes up themes he has pursued on several occasions, including crimes committed in the name of the state, the brutalisation of militarism, the exploitation of the demoralised unemployed and the thoughtless ill-treatment of native populations.
Scripted by his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty, Route Irish is a characteristic Loach film, a gripping conspiracy thriller not unlike Hidden Agenda, his film on the Troubles. Quite...
- 3/20/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Although proud of the films which portray my city's recurring themes of poverty, violence and deprivation, I occasionally yearn for something more uplifting
A chorus line of fluffers and panderers will gather this August, as they always do, at the Edinburgh International Film Festival to celebrate Kazimierz Lubanski's lost Warsaw arthouse études. Or perhaps it may be Igor Masopust's seminal, and rarely seen, Carpathian trilogie. But whichever it is, I will wonder, and not for the first time, when they will get round to assembling a retrospective on the emerging west of Scotland cinematic oeuvre which has been loosely christened Glasgow Noir by some and Clyde Mort by others.
Next week, I hope to view the latest work in this canon, Neds, by the gifted actor and director Peter Mullan. I'm told it is a gritty and visceral study on how ancient and tribal gang loyalties destroy the academic dream...
A chorus line of fluffers and panderers will gather this August, as they always do, at the Edinburgh International Film Festival to celebrate Kazimierz Lubanski's lost Warsaw arthouse études. Or perhaps it may be Igor Masopust's seminal, and rarely seen, Carpathian trilogie. But whichever it is, I will wonder, and not for the first time, when they will get round to assembling a retrospective on the emerging west of Scotland cinematic oeuvre which has been loosely christened Glasgow Noir by some and Clyde Mort by others.
Next week, I hope to view the latest work in this canon, Neds, by the gifted actor and director Peter Mullan. I'm told it is a gritty and visceral study on how ancient and tribal gang loyalties destroy the academic dream...
- 3/14/2011
- by Kevin McKenna
- The Guardian - Film News
Updated: Ok, so I’ve had way to many emails from you guys pointing out that the Oscar form isn’t working for some of you this time around. I’ve put my best team of problem solvers on the issue and they can’t work it out, but 7 or 8 of you have told me it’s not working for you… so I presume there’s many more out there. To date we’ve had a little less entries than last time, so this problem is too much for me to ignore.
My only solution for now is for you to email your picks to editor@obsessedwithfilm.com. I will be collating results on Monday or Tuesday, so you’ve got a bit of time left to enter.
Now you’ve read our 1999 Academy Awards retrospective, here’s your chance to re-write history without the hassle of going back in...
My only solution for now is for you to email your picks to editor@obsessedwithfilm.com. I will be collating results on Monday or Tuesday, so you’ve got a bit of time left to enter.
Now you’ve read our 1999 Academy Awards retrospective, here’s your chance to re-write history without the hassle of going back in...
- 12/11/2010
- by Matt Holmes
- Obsessed with Film
LONDON -- Veteran filmmaker Ken Loach has teamed with FilmFour for his next picture, the parties said Thursday. The Channel 4-owned film unit will back These Times, to be directed by Loach, from a script by longtime collaborator Paul Laverty and is billed as a "contemporary story set in Britain." FilmFour will co-finance the film which is being produced by Loach's longtime producer partner Rebecca O'Brien under the pair's banner Sixteen Films. Shooting will start in the autumn on location outside London and in Scotland, the filmmakers said. FilmFour and Loach have previously worked together on several films including Bread and Roses, My Name Is Joe and Carla's Song.
- 5/18/2006
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
LONDON -- Veteran filmmaker Ken Loach has teamed with FilmFour for his next picture, the parties said Thursday. The Channel 4-owned film unit will back These Times, to be directed by Loach, from a script by longtime collaborator Paul Laverty and is billed as a "contemporary story set in Britain." FilmFour will co-finance the film which is being produced by Loach's longtime producer partner Rebecca O'Brien under the pair's banner Sixteen Films. Shooting will start in the autumn on location outside London and in Scotland, the filmmakers said. FilmFour and Loach have previously worked together on several films including Bread and Roses, My Name Is Joe and Carla's Song.
- 5/18/2006
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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