Ken Loach – all his films ranked!

37. 11’09”01 September 11 (segment “United Kingdom”) (2002)

Ken Loach’s contribution to this short-film package of film-makers’ responses to 9/11 is a perfectly serviceable account of a different September 11: an activist’s letter to America about the coup against President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. At the time it seemed jarring, and in retrospect very much not what was needed; but it’s not the worst of the bunch – González Iñárritu gets nul points for incorporating footage of people jumping from the collapsing World Trade Center in a sound/image collage.

36. The End of Arthur’s Marriage (1965)

A somewhat supercilious satire on the property-owning middle classes that Loach later admitted he was the wrong director for: a little bit Fassbinder, a little bit Gurney Slade. It played into Loach’s favourite theme – the little man against the system – but the director’s instincts are not best served by wackiness. A shame, as it throws away a great lead performance by Ken Jones, a regular Loach collaborator, and later immortalised as the prison snitch Ives in Porridge.

35. Fatherland (1986)

Not an adaptation of the Robert Harris alternative-history novel, but a patchy account of an East German musician as unhappy under communism as he is in the west. This is Loach’s signature theme – systems and authority of any kind are open to abuse – but he is never at his best with non-English-speaking characters and this film (almost entirely in German) is not exactly a triumph.

34. Tickets (2005)

Another package film, with Loach directing the final third after chunks from Ermanno Olmi (The Tree of Wooden Clogs) and Abbas Kiarostami. It’s a clever idea – train tickets as a symbol for wider social permissions – and Loach’s bit is nice but slight, with a bunch of Celtic fans squabbling among themselves whether to help an Albanian migrant family.

33. Three Clear Sundays (1965)

The earliest of Loach’s Wednesday Plays to survive shows his early style in full flow. A talky, digressive piece, this anti-death penalty broadside is infused with a jittery hyperactive energy as Loach sought to overcome the staid traditions of television drama. It’s a bit on the stagey side, with lots of cockney chat, but the final execution scene, when poor Tony Selby is strung up for killing a prison officer, still packs a hell of a punch.

32. The Golden Vision (1968)

Loach may not be an obvious football man, but it’s a thread that runs through his work. This innovative mix of drama and documentary pleasingly focuses on a cult figure from Everton’s mid-60s cup-winning side: the Scottish midfielder Alex Young. Loach (as ever) is more interested in the fans and how football folds into their lives (more good work from Ken Jones), with real-life footage of Everton personnel (including Young) talking to camera about their lives. In truth, it doesn’t amount to all that much, but texturally it’s still pretty interesting.

31. The Big Flame (1969)

Loach really nailed his political colours to the mast with this script by the Trotskyist former docker Jim Allen, and in doing so proved that the intricacies of an industrial dispute could be material for compelling, if not exactly exhilarating, drama. Nevertheless, this was evidence that Loach had achieved what he had clearly been aiming at for some time: acting so planed down it was indistinguishable from reality.

30. Carla’s Song (1996)

You can see the attraction of the Nicaraguan civil war: one of the great international causes of the 80s. The involvement of Robert Carlyle, fresh from Trainspotting, gave this film a shot in the arm, although the somewhat saucer-eyed approach to the Latin characters – particularly Carla herself, with whose exotic mystery Carlyle’s bus driver falls in love – doesn’t do the film many favours.

29. Jimmy’s Hall (2014)

An uncomplicated, comfort-zone paean to the Irish communist Jimmy Gralton, whose brand of free-thinking is too much for the local worthies in 1930s Ireland. There’s not much light and shade here: Gralton (Barry Ward) is your standard crinkle-eyed nice-guy, a sacrificial lamb to the republic’s new intolerance.

28. The Rank and File (1971)

Loach’s mature, unadorned style emerged with this account of a labour dispute in north-west England, a BBC Play for Today that is essentially a lightly fictionalised treatment of the 1970 Pilkington glass strike. It recreates the smoke-filled rooms and committee discussions, establishing that the unions and management are both conspiring to shore up a system that keeps the ordinary workers in their place. Compared to The Big Flame, which covers not dissimilar ground, this is a sober, unblinking treatment, eliminating the flourishes of his 60s work. Heavy-duty stuff.

27. In Two Minds (1967)

While there is something fundamentally naive in this film’s analysis of mental illness – merging RD Laing’s anti-organic thesis with his own politics, Loach aims to pin responsibility for its subject’s schizophrenia on “social conditions”, namely, Kate’s poor relationship with her mother – this is high-achieving formally. Formatted as a documentary, with a stream of “interviews” and voiceover, this is fiction disguised very convincingly as fact. Unusually, Loach slips into point-of-view as the final ECT scenes approach.

26. Looking for Eric (2009)

This one is a bit of an outrider. Loach scored something of a coup by casting the Manchester United legend Eric Cantona as a sort of Play It Again, Sam-style dope-fuelled fantasy adviser to a harassed Mancunian postman. It’s got its strong points, but the required wackiness isn’t always there.

25. Route Irish (2010)

Named after the road into Baghdad airport, Loach’s assault on the west’s murky activities in Iraq focuses on the outsourcing of fighting and the subsequent corporate cover-up. It is one of his more conventional-looking films, and takes on a big target – possibly too big for the scale of film Loach is able to mount.

24. Family Life (1971)

A remake/reworking of In Two Minds, framed as a more traditional dramatic narrative and with the central character’s troubled mindset more obviously triggered by the generation gap and the abortion she was made to have. Although this film follows a similar trajectory, finding environmental and social causes for her erratic behaviour, leading to seemingly brutal ECT treatment, Loach wisely retreats a little from the wider mental-illness thesis of the original.

23. The Angels’ Share (2012)

A lightweight entry in Loach’s Scottish cycle: a violent tearaway (played by Paul Brannigan) resolves to get out of the Glasgow gang life by stealing some valuable whisky. This actually has a happy ending (of sorts), but Loach doesn’t quite succeed in making a basically vicious central character likable.

22. Ae Fond Kiss … (2004)

This film contains one of the few non-white lead characters in Loach’s work: Casim, son of Pakistani immigrants, who embarks on a forbidden relationship with Catholic school teacher Roisin. Loach’s target, as ever, is the system of control that prevents ordinary people from achieving freedom in their lives; this inter-ethnic romance does a decent job in exploring religion and immigrant culture, but it isn’t Loach’s natural habitat.

21. Raining Stones (1993)

A likable comedy from Loach’s early-90s resurgence, working from a Jim Allen script about an on-his-uppers chancer trying to scrape together enough money for a communion dress for his daughter. It’s not one of his most resonant films, but is basically good natured and an excellent example of the director’s unerring ability to get great performances from first-timers: the lead is Bruce Jones, who was a club-circuit comic at the time.

20. Ladybird, Ladybird (1994)

Another great spot from Loach: Crissy Rock, another former club comic, is tremendous as self-destructive mum Maggie, who has lost four of her children to social services after a string of disastrous relationships. Loach, characteristically, is doing his utmost to extract sympathy for one of life’s casualties; there is little sympathy to spare for the council workers trying to deal with her.

19. Up the Junction (1965)

In its day, this adaptation of Nell Dunn’s stories for the Wednesday Play spot was notorious for its agonised abortion/miscarriage sequence; but there’s more to this than outrage. Like its predecessor Three Clear Sundays, this is a rangy, digressive portrait of street life; here it is about three young women working in a wash-house in Battersea and is a depiction of a marginalised, under-represented community that hums with life. The abortion itself is interestingly consequence-free; the three leads (who include Carol White in her first Loach role) are all great.

18. Black Jack (1979)

One of Loach’s few attempts to make a putatively commercial “family film”: this is adapted from Leon Garfield’s book about a kid in the 18th century who falls in with an itinerant, hulking villain (the Black Jack of the title), rescues a girl who has been sent to the madhouse and works for a funfair. It is unusual, interesting material for a children’s film, even by 70s standards, but the flat, ultra-naturalistic acting style Loach employed works against the extravagant storyline: the whole thing could have been a bit more rollicking.

17. Bread and Roses (2000)

Loach held his nose and went to the US to make this statement-film about exploitation of immigrant workers in Los Angeles. It stars Adrien Brody as a union organiser who (wouldn’t you know it?) falls in love with one of the women he is defending. Even so, Loach lands some telling sledgehammer blows, even if – outside his UK and Ireland comfort zone – much of his customary nuance is absent.

16. The Spirit of 45 (2013)

In retrospect, this looks like an early emanation of the nostalgia-socialism that helped pave the way for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership triumph two years later. A compendium of interviews of warhorse campaigners and archive-clip history about Clement Attlee’s landslide victory in 1945, this is just about the only Loach documentary expressly aimed at the cinema. Although its contemporary political purpose is rather over-evident, it is still a stirring vision of what used to be, and what many hoped could be again.

15. Hidden Agenda (1990)

A conspiracy thriller that marked Loach’s return to feature film-making after a difficult 1980s spent trying (and often failing) to get his TV projects broadcast. As with the later Route Irish, Loach goes for a relatively mainstream style to tell an incendiary political story: here it is about British military collusion in the murder of a human rights lawyer (clearly related to the real-life killing of Pat Finucane). It is a bit by-the-numbers stylewise, but it re-established Loach as a radical force.

14. The Gamekeeper (1980)

A feature-length drama made for ITV, adapted from a Barry Hines novel, and about as pared-down a piece as Loach is ever likely to make. Phil Askham is the eponymous estate worker, caught between competing loyalties and as out of place down the pub with the poacher-forgiving locals as with the capped-and-Barboured shooting gentry. There is no plot to speak of: just an incremental progression of incident (some, like rabbit hunting with ferrets, looks pretty gruesome for modern sensibilities), but it’s remarkable all the same: a working life in collision with muddy, bloody nature.

13. The Navigators (2001)

Unusually, this full-length feature had its UK premiere on TV; perhaps reflecting the popular nature of its subject: rail privatisation. Loach has always admired “railwaymen” for their tight organisation and solidarity: he clearly enjoyed bringing out their camaraderie in an appealing film that had self-evident real-world parallels. Staffed with the customary lineup of club comics and singers turned actors, this is Loach in confident, mid-season form.

12. Cathy Come Home (1966)

The pick of Loach’s 1960s TV work, and not just for the galvanising effect it had on the then, and still, current concerns over homelessness. Carol White is tremendous as the mother who desperately tries to hang on to her children as her domestic situation becomes ever more precarious (husband injured at work, clashes with the in-laws, hard-hearted landlord). This is society as a slowly closing trap, with Loach accusatory towards the social workers and housing officers who are as cold as everyone else. The final scene, where Cathy’s children are taken off her in a railway station, is horrible in its raw intensity.

11. Sweet Sixteen (2002)

In the late 90s and early 00s, Scotland provided a rich seam of material for Loach and this one – nominally a teen movie – is one of the finest. Starring Martin Compston (another first-timer who, unlike most of Loach’s discoveries, has gone on to enjoy a solid acting career), this is a rough, violent tale of Glasgow kid sucked, not entirely reluctantly, into the drug-dealing life. His naive dreams of escape soon evaporate: there is no going back.

10. It’s a Free World … (2007)

Kierston Wareing made a real splash in this excellent and well-observed drama (like The Navigators, a TV premiere in the UK but a cinema release in other countries). And also like that film, Loach finds a new seam of material in the outsourced working world, where job security and back-up have melted away. Wareing is a new version of the hemmed-in Loach figure: a recruitment agent ruthless to those below, a victim of those above, with none of the security net of old-style employment. Loach’s main target is the apparent freedom such conditions promise: the reality is very different.

9. Looks and Smiles (1981)

Loach was reportedly very disappointed by the box office failure of this Barry Hines adaptation, which motivated his return to TV in the ensuing decade. In retrospect, it is not hard to see why audiences avoided it: it is an incredibly gloomy black-and-white portrait of boredom and the Thatcherite recession. Looking at it now, it is an unexpectedly charming film: a study of a teenage relationship in adversity, staged with a total commitment to realism and awkwardness, and light years away from the John Hughes teen movies that would be coming down the pipe a few years later.

8. I, Daniel Blake (2016)

A monster success – the Cannes Palme d’Or and record box office – that must have come as a pleasant surprise. All Loach’s characteristic ingredients are here: a fierce concentration on hot-button social issues (food banks and benefits assessment); preternaturally realistic performance; a standup comic (Dave Johns) doing his first bit of acting. Released in the year of the Brexit referendum, and surfing on the Momentum-inspired confidence of the anti-austerity left, the film unexpectedly hit a major nerve. If we are being absolutely honest, as a film it is solid if not spectacular (although the awful baked-beans scene is up there with Loach’s most harrowing). In terms of impact, though, it is something else.

7. My Name Is Joe (1998)

Loach didn’t exactly discover Peter Mullan, who had been bobbing about for years – and had even played one of the builders in Riff-Raff (see below) – but he gave him a tremendous showcase in what turned out to be the finest of Loach’s Scotland-set films. Mullan plays the classic Loachian male: struggling with demons, hoping to be redeemed by love but dragged down by misplaced loyalties. It’s Mullan’s charisma that puts this one over the top, both ferocious and tender as the film requires it.

6. Sorry We Missed You (2019)

Loach’s new film, his first since Blake, shows that he can pull off top-notch work as he heads into his 80s. As a subject, the gig economy appears to have only intensified the director’s motivations and his principal character here, delivery driver Ricky (Kris Hitchen), exemplifies the new type of trapped victim: worker solidarity has been destroyed by zero-hours contracts, with devastating effects on Ricky’s working and family life. It also contains one of Loach’s most memorable bad-guy characters: self-proclaimed “nasty bastard” Maloney, the warehouse supervisor played by Ross Brewster.

5. Land and Freedom (1995)

Loach suddenly expanded his horizons in the mid-90s with this tribute to the foreign fighters who got involved in the Spanish civil war – another cause eternally dear to the left’s heart. Ian Hart – who had just played John Lennon in Backbeat – turned in a fine performance as the Liverpudlian communist who travels out to join the struggle in the 1930s; like many a Loach protagonist before and since, supposed good guys (in this case, the Stalinist cadres of the International Brigades) are as bad as the official enemy. The script, by Jim Allen, posits the Trotskyist POUM militia as the real heroes. Rather brilliantly, Loach applied his ultra-realist style to the combat scenes, of house-to-house guerrilla warfare, with impressive results; they effectively balance out the longwinded scenes of political discussion.

4. Poor Cow (1967)

After making a splash with his TV work, Loach was picked up by Joseph Janni, the celebrated producer of British new wave films such as Billy Liar, Darling and Far from the Madding Crowd. This was Loach’s feature debut, and it imported all the strengths of his previous films: empathetic drama, brilliantly natural performances (including one from Terence Stamp, amazingly right at the height of his 60s stardom), and an audacious deployment of on-camera improvisation. This very much benefited from being more focused and less digressive than the TV plays, and its refusal to find neat narrative solutions pointed the way ahead for Loach’s film work.

3. The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006)

Loach’s first Palme d’Or went to this complex, large-scale film about the Irish state’s birthing pains, spanning both the war of independence against the British and the subsequent civil war that followed it. Like Land and Freedom, this suggested that authentic radical values were destroyed, cynically, by revolutionaries-in-name-only: Cillian Murphy, as a socialist doctor and IRA soldier, is the vessel through which this conflict is explored – first fighting alongside, and then against, his brother Teddy. It is a thoroughly absorbing film, and very much not the propaganda piece one might expect (although, inevitably, the British, fuelled by their imperial arrogance, don’t come out well).

2. Riff-Raff (1991)

Loach has always liked to make films about camaraderie: the literal representation of the class solidarity so central to his political thinking, and something in desperately short supply in the era of outsourcing and privatisation. Riff-Raff is arguably his finest treatment of the theme: the group of builders working on (symbolism alert!) a former hospital being turned into luxury flats. The lead actor is Robert Carlyle, in a career-making performance as Stevie: Ricky Tomlinson (former real-world union activist and long-term resident of Brookside) was a revelation as the effervescent socialist and site leader. Loach also contrived one of his most moving romances, between Stevie and Emer McCourt’s Susan, undone by drugs and difficult circumstances. It is perhaps not Loach’s most hard-hitting film, but it is his most purely likable.

1. Kes (1969)

It may have spent decades in school-treat screening hell, but Kes’s glories remain undimmed 50 years after it was first released. Adapted from Barry Hines’s novel about a kid who becomes obsessed with looking after a bird of prey, it has got an obvious point of entry for school-age children – it is the ultimate misfit story – so its popularity as a classroom time-filler is understandable.

As a parable of how individuality is squashed and warped – not only by the heartless teachers, but by Billy Casper’s uncaring family – it is as heartrending as ever. Loach got one of his most miraculously brilliant performances in the central role from David “Dai” Bradley; the raft of others on hand include Brian Glover as the bullying sports teacher and Colin Welland as the friendlier English teacher.

What sets the film apart, though, is that Kes is Loach’s most brilliant film cinematically: his and cinematographer Chris Menges’s interest in the Czech new wave found its expression in beautifully astute choices of shot and lighting, alternately amplifying the story’s wit, cruelty and desperation. It may seem churlish to pick Loach’s second feature as his best, but Kes has stood the test of time like no other, and will surely continue to do so.