Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023) 
Director: Sam Fell
Screenwriters: Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell, Rachel Tunnard
Starring: Bella Ramsey, Thandiwe Newton, Zachary Levi, Imelda Staunton, Lynn Ferguson, David Bradley, Jane Horrocks, Romesh Ranganathan, Daniel Mays, Josie Sedgwick-Jones, Peter Serafinowicz, Nick Mohammed, Miranda Richardson

On the surface, the original Chicken Run (2000) was a fantastic children’s movie and a feat for animated films. It was 90 minutes of pure feathery fun and righteous chicken anger. The movie had impeccable comedic timing akin to Aardman Studio’s other works like Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. These movies have a beating heart and soul that has stuck with children and adults alike because of their ability to wrap us in the warm hug of their respective worlds. And still, beneath it all lies something even deeper, something profound. For many millennials and cuspers, Chicken Run was an introduction to Marxism and revolution itself. 

As rebel chicken, Ginger (played by Julia Sawalha in 2000) rallies the hens against tyrannical farmers, she dares them to imagine a world governed only by their own will. “Don’t you get it?” she clucks, “There’s no morning headcount, no dogs, no farmers, no coops and keys, and no fences.” It’s a powerful cry for revolution – a call to rise up against injustice, no matter the cost. Though the film is filled with slapstick humor, its demand to rage against oppression transcends the children’s animation genre, cementing it as a powerful allegory for World War II and universal demands for human (and chicken) rights. 

Needless to say, the sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, was highly anticipated by audiences and critics. Nearly 20 years after the original, the follow-up had big shoes to fill. What lessons would the new Chicken Run teach us? Perhaps something about the rise of fascism? Environmentalism? Maybe it would lead us to the answers we’ve all been searching for in these tumultuous times? Unfortunately, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget takes more of a formulaic follow-up approach than broaching anything remotely groundbreaking. 

In this rendition, Ginger (Thandiwe Newton) and Rocky (Zachary Levi, replacing Mel Gibson) return, now living in an idyllic, poultry utopia. Though they are happy in their new homes, they are closed off from the rest of society. Their daughter, Molly (Bella Ramsey), takes after her mother and dreams of life bigger than their confined existence on the island. Soon, Molly escapes to the mainland and finds herself trapped in a chicken factory called Fun-Land Farm. Now, it’s up to the other chickens to break into the factory, a subversion from the previous film’s breakout. 

Dawn of the Nugget isn’t completely without charm. The animation is beautiful and bright, stepping away from the original film’s muted color palate to favor a more vibrant chicken paradise. Fun-Land Farm is garishly bright, showcasing the false promises of the deceptively named poultry plant. Even the heist-like stunts feel higher stakes and more elaborate. There are more hijinks, slipping, falling, and scrambling than ever. 

Though the scale feels dialled up to 11, the film is missing its original creativity and simplistic but resilient spirit that made it an instant classic. Dawn of the Nugget is much more concerned with simple tropes like breaking away from tradition and marching to the beat of your own drum than anything revolutionary. Its simple premise and resistance to taking risks – both thematically and comedically – make the 101-minute run feel like a bit of a slog. 

It’s a lot to ask of a film – to be both a succinct manifesto about the state of modern politics and revolutionary movements and a hokey comedy about chickens falling on their heads – but it has been done before. Perhaps the reason Dawn of the Nugget felt so flat is the enormous shadow its predecessor casts upon the film. And, in the 20 years in between the first and second editions of Ginger and Rocky’s story, we’ve had plenty of time to fill in the gaps on our own. Dawn of the Nugget is a fine movie to turn on for the kids on a Saturday afternoon, but turn on Chicken Run (2000) and you might just have a revolution on your hands. 

Score: 12/24

Recommended for you: Aardman Animation Movies 2000-2020 Ranked

The year is 1995, and the child is me.

I can never verify how much of the above tale happened, or which parts of it I have embellished over the years, but the story is true. I specifically remember being told that the flower Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka drinks from and then takes a bite out of wasn’t real food, and I consequently went through the thought process of wondering what else in the film wasn’t real and who made all of those things. I can’t remember if prior to that moment I thought everything in films was a historical document of a true story, or whether I had any thoughts about them at all, but I know that watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was my light-bulb moment, my transition from being a baby into being a child, my moment of consciousness. 

The wonderment I found that day has been one of the most lasting and rewarding aspects of my three-plus decades on this planet. Each time I feel like my flame for cinema has been extinguished (by life, by society, by corporatisation, by existential threats to the theatrical experience, by politics), it has been sparked back into life by miraculous feat of cinematic artistry after miraculous feat of cinematic artistry. As I’ve grown and learned and progressed, I have been inspired, have been nurtured, and have been guided by film. 

With so many life-shaping, existential experiences to recall, and so many lessons learned and viewpoints shaped by this wondrous moving picture art form, I find myself in the same place I began: wide-eyed and cross-legged, jaw agape, entirely present. 

In this moment of absolute consciousness, the following ten films are what I have long deliberated to be the best of all time. These films are form-shaping, movement-defining, genre-topping pieces, each from remarkable filmmakers who were able to capture lightning in a bottle by making something greatly artistic and intellectually rewarding, something emotionally and contextually resonant. These films challenged convention, rewrote popular thought, established rules and in most cases broke them, and together they are the thousands of films I have experienced, the entire historical context of the industry I have studied in great depth, the more-than a quarter of a century of consciousness I have dedicated to the form. These are the 10 Best Films of All Time by me, Joseph Wade.

Follow me on X (Twitter – @JoeTFM

10. Casablanca (1942)

Casablanca Review

The modern Hollywood blockbuster is a monumental part of the cinema experience, and one of the reasons you’re reading this article and I’m writing it. Some of the classics that have lit up the big screen and revolutionised the form are Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, and The Dark Knight. While Buster Keaton’s timeless action-comedy The General (1926) has had perhaps the most direct influence of any film in history regarding contemporary studio filmmaking – many of its scenes still borrowed from and replicated to this day, its train scene being paid homage to in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One in 2023 – it is Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca that can be found most prominently across many modern thrillers, actioners, and superhero movies.

Curtiz’s romantic drama is perhaps the most overlooked film of all time regarding the size of its influence on modern filmmaking. There are sequences, set in the markets of Casablanca, that are almost directly copied in Star Wars and the Indiana Jones movies, and the film’s themes of good, evil, and the people in between being forced to choose a side, is a foundational aspect of every successful modern studio blockbuster. While the romantic themes of Casablanca may be lost in most mainstream tentpole releases in the 2020s – a sorry loss that we should fight to get back – the foundational parts of its script, and particularly the way it is presented, shot, and constructed in the edit, are ultra modern and ever-present in our current day cinema. You can watch Casablanca more than eighty years after its release and experience the same pacing as modern success stories like Top Gun: Maverick, which given the releases of the time and the size of the equipment used to film and edit them, is a remarkable achievement. 

Beyond the technical achievements and revolutionary ideas that caused its influence to be so long lasting, Casablanca is a powerful and emotive film. Humphrey Bogart soars to new career heights as a romantic leading man, Rick Blaine, the owner of Rick’s, a jazz bar in the titular Moroccan city of Casablanca. To think that he wasn’t thought charismatic enough to be a romantic lead during this era is remarkable in retrospect, but this performance is one that corrected that mistake and laid the foundations for one of the great romantic careers in Hollywood history. His character is reunited with an old flame, Ilsa Lund (played with all the natural fierceness that Ingrid Bergman imprinted onto every single one of her characters – she is arguably an even more powerful screen presence than Bogart), and the pair accidentally set light to old feelings. As it’s World War II, the Nazi forces of North Africa are an ever present threat to the two leads and their romance as well as the way of life of the entire cast of supporting characters. The USA was just entering the 2nd World War during the events of Casablanca, and the nation is romantically presented as a distant beacon of hope in the film; the promise land that the Statue of Liberty so gloriously signified to the millions of refugees and immigrants that made their way to the shores of New York and beyond at that time. 

This film features a lot of what we’ve all grown to love about the golden era of Hollywood, and even the biggest movies of today, but it is unique for the very reasons that it remains memorable and iconic so many decades later. It is tragic with a small glimmer of hope, Hays Code era romantic but not asinine, and features two of the most legendary screen actors of all time in all of their transatlantic accented best. No matter what you’ve heard of Bogart and Bergman, they’re all that and then some. Better still, they’re presented in that sumptuous black and white of the era, through risk-taking and modern cinematographic techniques, through the astonishingly detailed set design that you can’t help but to marvel at, and scored to perfection in a composition by Max Steiner that could very well be included on a very short list of movie scores to have helped build the foundations of Warner Bros. 

Casablanca is the archetypal Hollywood movie, the very best of a list of classics that includes Gone with the Wind and It’s a Wonderful Life. It is everything that the myth of Hollywood represents, a pristine example of cinema that captured the anxieties and the hope of its time like few other films managed to do, and told it in such a universally appreciated way that we can still feel forced to the edge of our seats and moved to tears in an entirely new century. Even with our modern understanding of the United States having been shifted to better understand non-white perspectives of its past, as well as the global perspectives of its present, Casablanca’s romanticised outlook on its nation, war, hope, and love, ensure it remains a culturally significant and artistically monumental Hollywood movie release, a shining light of the cinematic form.

9. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Singin’ in the Rain is the epitome of Golden Era Hollywood: vast soundstages dressed beautifully by experts in the field, lit with all the glow of the sun; once in a lifetime performers offering timeless qualities that you just don’t see anymore; a self-reflective narrative that pokes fun at the studio system; a happy time at the movies that keeps the conflict manageable and the highs universal, so even the little ones can enjoy themselves. This is Hollywood cinema; romance, music, colour and beauty, projected for all to see. 

The film stars Gene Kelly in the midst of his decade of superstardom. He’s a unique talent – a ballet dancer with movie star good looks, the kind of smile that could steal a nation of hearts – and the only person who could take a combination of songs discarded from other productions and make it into something irreplaceable within the annals of cinema history. He is the anchor around which everything floats, the fulcrum of the entire movie, the superstar upon whose back this entire era seemed to rest. Watching the Gene Kelly of the 1940s or 50s in the 2020s will have the same effect it did seventy years prior: the magic will simply pour out of the screen, drowning the noise of your every day and lighting up your endorphins time and time again.

In Singin’ in the Rain, Kelly plays a silent era film star whose career is about to meet an unfortunate end due to the advent of sound. He meets Debbie Reynolds’ party performer with a voice of gold in a chance meeting and the two court for the duration of the film’s runtime, her rise to relative superstardom coming as fast as Kelly’s relative fall from it. It’s all singing and dancing and pursuing the one thing you’ve been told you’re good at just because you believe it might one day work out for you; a Hollywood story about Hollywood that inspired youngest-ever Best Director Oscar winner Damien Chazelle on La La Land and Babylon; a type of self-aware American Dream narrative that doesn’t yet seem poisoned by the lost wars, anxieties and terror of the decades to come. 

Perhaps best of all, it is so fist-clenchingly uplifting. You truly feel the ecstasy of each career-orientated achievement just as the characters do. The music is, of course, vital to achieving this, and so far as original soundtracks go there are few (if any) better. From “Good Morning” to the titular track “Singin’ in the Rain”, this film is as loaded with classic songs as the best films of the era, as any era that followed, an often imitated but never duplicated success story.

As an adult, there are few viewing experiences that can show you something new, or fresh, or better than before, but witnessing Gene Kelly at the height of his powers is one of those experiences. His presence in Singin’ in the Rain is the realisation of all he brought to cinema in the ultra modern On the Town (1949) and the classic stage ballet on film, An American in Paris (1951). He isn’t the only glowing aspect of this cinematic marvel, but he is breathtaking, astounding, simply incomparable. Unmissable. 

Singin’ in the Rain was made in-part in tribute to the classics of the early Hollywood musicals, such as those by Fred Astaire (Top Hat, Swing Time), and continues to serve as inspiration for a wide variety of films to this day, from the entire plot being the basis of Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022) to the “I’m Just Ken” musical segment from Barbie (2023). But, as an artefact of Hollywood at its most sumptuous, timeless and expansive, it is perhaps even more special; arguably the greatest Hollywood studio movie of all time.

Recommended for you: Where to Start with Gene Kelly

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)
Directors: Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson
Screenwriters: Guillermo del Toro, Patrick McHale
Starring: Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, Gregory Mann, Christoph Waltz, Tilda Swinton, Ron Perlman, Finn Wolfhard, Cate Blanchett, Burn Gorman, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson

“Pinocchio” adaptations are like buses, apparently; you wait for one for ages and then three come along at once.

Guillermo del Toro has often spoken of a few key formative texts that have influenced his storytelling through the medium of film from the very beginning. One is Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and another is Carlo Collodi’s “The Adventures of Pinocchio”, which he brings to striking life in stop-motion animation for Netflix here.

In a reimagining of the classic children’s story re-staged to take place in the lead up to WWII and the rise of Mussolini’s fascist Italy, Sebastian J Cricket (Ewan McGregor) recounts the tale of woodcarver Geppetto (David Bradley) who makes a puppet to replace his beloved son Carlo (Gregory Mann) whom was lost to a bombing raid. Hardly any time at all after Pinocchio (also voiced by Mann) is brought to life by magic, he is separated from his father and exploited by many parties interested in the potential of an immortal wooden being. 

“No art form has influenced my life and my work more than animation, and no single character in history has had as deep of a personal connection to me as Pinocchio.” – Guillermo del Toro

The sheer amount of detail packed into every hand-crafted frame is truly staggering. Every environment buzzes with life, every incidental background character seems to be on a journey of their own taking place just off-screen. From the moment we see the meticulousness of Geppetto’s craft, how much love he puts into every stage of shaping an unremarkable lump of wood into something useful, or something beautiful, we get the unmistakable sense that the team of animators working on the film are putting just as much of themselves into their own craft.

This Pinocchio definitely feels of a piece with del Toro’s other period pieces that discuss the innocence of childhood ended by warfare, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, and it’s no wonder as he has said in interviews that he considers them a thematic trilogy.

You find yourself thinking of such dark satires as Jojo Rabbit in the terrifying scenes of fascist soldiers preparing child recruits with war games while extolling the virtues of fanatical nationalism. This is the very creepy substitution for the boys being kidnapped and transformed into donkeys seen in most versions of the story. 

Del Toro famously loves his monsters and he isn’t afraid of making his Pinocchio monstrous to an extent. The horror-tinged spidery way he moves when he first wakes up and springs at a terrified Geppetto (he just wants a hug), and the manner in which he is broken down and rebuilt multiple times throughout the film, is rather disturbing and at odds with his positive, affable personality. The wooden boy is understandably confused and saddened at the reaction he provokes at church when the congregation are proclaiming him as something unnatural and sinful with one breath, and worshipping a wooden Jesus on the cross the next. 

About 40 minutes into this latest take on Pinocchio you might be feeling like it’s a pretty standard re-telling of the story using the most labour-intensive form of animation there is. But then the wooden boy ends up in a kind of limbo, escorted by undead rabbits to an audience with the sphinx-like Angel of Death (Tilda Swinton), and you realise that only del Toro would tell the tale quite like this; Gothic and metaphysical. All versions of “Pinocchio” are about love and what it means to be human, but no other version is as explicitly about death and living with grief.

A debate that went semi-viral recently with the release of Henry Sellick’s Wendell & Wild was how little credit stop-motion directors receive compared to their big name collaborators who have also made live-action films. It’s known as Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas because he conceived it and produced it, but many forget that Sellick was the director and was there every step of the way. While there’s little doubt that del Toro was more hands-on here than Burton ever was, you have to give credit to his co-director Mark Gustafson for the day-to-day guiding of the project and being an essential part of making the animation come to life.

As per usual with del Toro’s work, humanity is far more monstrous than anything otherworldly. The characters are a mixture of those from Collodi’s story (Pinocchio and Geppetto, the Cricket, Candlewick) and new creations to fit the time and place this version is set in. Ron Perlman’s sinister fascist officer Podestà not only serves the same story function as the Coachman from Collodi’s story but could also conceivably be the Italian cousin of Vidal from Pan’s Labyrinth, and Christoph Waltz’s creepy Mangiafuoco/Stromboli stand-in Count Volpe (a gleefully entertaining vocal performance) evokes every exploitative charlatan that profits in times of turmoil.

If there’s one major criticism you could level at this new Pinocchio, it’s that it tries to keep too many plates spinning in the air at once. Thank heavens that it’s not the bland, mass-produced product that was the recent Disney/Robert Zemeckis version, but it also occasionally loses sight of the pure heart and the sheer magic of the thing in its eagerness to make this version darker and more relevant to contemporary society. It is admittedly stronger when it’s being bleak and thoughtful as some of the jokes and certainly most of the songs don’t quite work (Sebastian’s is so bad it becomes a running gag that he keeps getting cut off right until the end credits).

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a vivid and hard-hitting reimagining of a classic story that can’t be faulted for its boldness, ambition and beauty, but loses some of the story’s pure, timeless simplicity and childlike sense of wonder. It’s in a completely different league to the latest Disney version, but it is still Matteo Garronne’s authentic Italian take from 2019 that is the most definitive of the recent adaptations.

Score: 20/24

The World’s End (2013)
Director: Edgar Wright
Screenwriters: Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright
Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan, Rosamund Pike, David Bradley

2013’s The World’s End has been cited by some fans as the most disappointing entry in the Cornetto Trilogy despite a positive reception from critics who welcomed it just as favourably as Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Coming 6 years after the trilogy’s middle entry, The World’s End acts as the culmination of the miniature series of Pegg, Frost and Wright collaborations, offering yet more reoccurring gags and winks for fans, with plenty for new new viewers to digest. It recounts a quintet of school friends, led by Simon Pegg’s Gary King, as they attempt to finish a pub crawl known as The Golden Mile they had attempted some twenty-plus years prior, encountering some otherworldly obstacles en-route.

One of the film’s major strengths is the way in which it flips the leading roles of the two previous films on their head. On this occasion Nick Frost plays the uptight, professional and reluctant straight-man to Pegg’s man-child, the latter firmly longing for his adolescent years. This change in roles does little to nullify the chemistry of the two leads who, by this point, are so in tune that they hit every single mark and establish a relateable leading duo even after 6 years apart. Martin Freeman as Oliver is also cast against type as a stone faced estate agent, a far cry from his roles as Bilbo in The Hobbit and Tim in ‘The Office’. The other two members of the central quintet are famed British talent Paddy Considine (who of course featured in Hot Fuzz) and Cornetto newcomer Eddie Marsan (Filth).

As with the two previous entries in the Cornetto Trilogy, there is an assortment of guest stars including standouts Pierce Brosnan, Rosamund Pike and David Bradley, with a further selection of familiar faces strewn across the 12 pubs visited, including (as always) some of the cast of Wright and Pegg’s cult TV sitcom ‘Spaced’.

The 6 year gap between the films, which saw Pegg and Wright establish themselves as some of Hollywood’s go-to filmmakers on the likes of Star Trek and Mission: Impossible (Pegg), and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Wright), was one of the major drawbacks for The World’s End at launch as it led expectations to be at a high level amongst fans. It is difficult to note whether the gap (in terms of time and expectation) affected the film’s box office haul, which was just over half of what Hot Fuzz made, but in terms of audience reception there must be some consideration made towards the high levels of expectation the duo brought with them into this film.

As was the case with the previous Cornetto movies, The World’s End once again treated us to some inventive action sequences, including the trademarked pub fight. The standout here was perhaps the brawl in the pub toilet, which proved to be imaginative and enthralling, and nicely contrasted the style of action seen in Hot Fuzz.

Thematically, The World’s End has plenty to say and is without question the most sobering of the Cornetto films. It offers commentary on the “Starbucking” of UK towns as many of Newton Haven’s pubs have been bought out by chains and have lost their unique qualities, with a recurring comment being whether it is our quintet or their childhood town that has changed the most. Another of the main themes is letting go of the past and any disappointment one might feel about how life has turned out, Gary commenting that his life was never as good as the night they first attempted the Golden Mile. The film also offers insight into life in a small town and the nature of a lads’ night out. Meanwhile, the surprising addition of an alien invasion thread proves to be satisfying and gives the premise a welcome breath of fresh air.

A great soundtrack is one of the hallmarks of the whole trilogy and music plays arguably its most prominent role in its finale. A particular emphasis is placed on 90s Britpop which reflects the group’s at-the-time burgeoning adulthood with tracks from the likes of The Stone Roses, Pulp and The Happy Mondays. In keeping with the pub crawl theme, several of the tracks including The Doors’ “Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)” and The Housemartins’ “Happy Hour” are nods to the film’s alcohol-fueled plot-line.

The World’s End does, overall, round the trilogy off in fine fashion. It is more of a slow burner than its two predecessors, building suspense and a sense that something is not quite right with the residents of Newton Haven, the audience and characters alike being teased for longer than before, and the slow build isn’t to everyone’s taste, but the contrasts to the previous entries tonally and character- wise bring added depth and ensure the film never feels formulaic or repetitive. In The World’s End, we are offered more of a varied glimpse at the acting chops of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as well as some strong support from the core cast. Perhaps the film will be viewed in a more positive light in the years to come and step out of the shadow of its two siblings to take on a life of its own, but for now it remains an underappreciated entry into the canon of the Cornetto films and Edgar Wright’s wider filmography.

Score: 17/24

Kes (1969)
Director: Ken Loach
Screenwriters: Barry Hines, Ken Loach, Tony Garnett
Starring: David Bradley, Freddie Fletcher, Lynne Perrie, Colin Welland, Brian Glover, Bob Bowes

Over 50 years have passed since director Ken Loach announced himself as the would-be voice of the underpriviliged Briton, his second feature Kes being a timeless account of downtrodden and forgotten about people and the places in which they live. This delicately told tale about a boy and his reared kestrel has long been understood as encapsulating the hopelessness of empoverished adolescence, though it’s the way in which Kes remains relevant, nay vital, to contemporary political discourse that is the true gage not only of this film’s immense quality but of the UK’s distinct lack of progress in the half a century since. In a first world country with over 4 million children living beneath the poverty line, Kes is sadly as relevant now as it ever has been, the messages within it ever-powerful and emotive, the movie a sharpshooter-level indictment of historical classism and its remaining power within British society.

“They say it’s a pet. It int a pet, sir. People come up to me and say “int it tame?” It int tame, sir. They can’t be tamed. They’re manned. They’re wild and fierce and not bothered about anybody. Not bothered about me. That’s what makes it great.”

The love between the young protagonist and his bird is one of duality. The Kestrel, for him, represents freedom, enlightenment, bravery and even grace, the boy making note of how you can’t hear the bird when it swoops, saying that it’s as if it demands you pay it respect. Yet the boy takes the bird from its nest in its adolescence and he proceeds to domesticate it through a training regime in which he encourages the bird to perform tasks (such as flying to him from a fence-post) for food, though only after he has led the bird to the point of starvation. The boy, Billy Casper (David Bradley), wishes for the ability to fly out of his nowhere town to chances anew, but he’s held back by the empoverishment of his family, the ruling class dictatorship over success and his need to feed himself; the very structures he sets in place for his bird.

Billy lives in a small village designated for working class and underclass people by the local council, at school he’s trained to adhere to a regime and abide by a strict routine, and he and his family are forced into the lowest paid jobs in order to put just a small amount of food on the table, while his bird is trapped in a bird cage in the garden, forced to adhere to strict rules and routine in order to survive, and then forced to work for just a small amount of food. The effect of these mirrored existences is devastating.

Loach has, over many films including recent releases Sorry We Missed You and particularly his Palme d’Or winner I, Daniel Blake, used this technique of duality and mirrored existences to emphasise key political and ideological points, and in Kes it seems to be at the forefront of every creative decision.

The boy’s slightly older, more aggressive, mysoginystic, insecure and old-before-his-time brother is himself a mirror; a mirror to Billy of what he can become and a vision to us of who Billy is likely to change into. The brother, Judd (played by Freddie Fletcher), is a miner with a poor reputation at the school Billy now attends and a fondness for physical violence. Like society has done to his family and Billy has done to his bird, Judd uses the qualities at his disposal (in this case being physically larger, the family’s central bread-winner, the so-called “man of the house”) to manipulate, restrict and at times bully Billy, though just as Billy is not to blame in his almost accidental dictatorship over his beloved Kestrel, Judd isn’t necessarily to blame here, Loach taking the time to follow his life just enough to gain an understanding of why he acts as he does, the clear villain of the piece being a lack of equality in contemporary british culture and the violence being a clear reaction to that.

The gross unfairness of the system and culture in which the child grows up in is played out, metaphorically and physically, through a game of football in a school Physical Education (P.E.) lesson, as Billy and his friends are subjected to the will of their teacher who bends and twists the rules with each blow of his whistle, turning the odds in his team’s favour and ensuring his dominance in, again, a useful mirror to society’s ruling classes. In perhaps one of the film’s only moments of hope and triumph, the teacher’s team is defeated, the school children running indoors as 2-1 victors in their mock FA Cup 5th Round tie, their shared joy held on the face of their less than pleased elder who stomps back to the changing rooms with little to no joy in his Manchester United inspired performance left for him to hold. The cruel reality here being that the victory is one Billy does not taste, his being the team that loses, his decisive moment in the match being the moment he misses the all-important save – his failure in performance soon punished thereafter with the demand that he take a shower, one the teacher sabotages to be freezing cold as he berates the school child’s performance. It is this that is the very representation of the upper class earning their stripes, asserting their dominance, empowering themselves at the expense of others, all to maintain a false sense of ego, pride and stability at the top of the food chain.

In the very next scene a child is wrongly accused of coughing during assembly and is subsequently caned by the headmaster in a punishing scene in which at least 3 of the 5 punished boys are entirely innocent, but none are guilty enough to receive such a beating. It’s the vision of a cold, unfair world, but one that rings all too true to children not only of Billy’s generation or those that came before, but those of the people in the decades to come too; the physical abuse long-since outlawed but the same unfair, dictatorial approach to schooling remaining in much of working class education in particular.

Ironically, Billy is given his chance to shine by a teacher – a mirror of what the P.E. teacher could be, a man with more acceptance and tolerance than his contemporaries, a vision of a fairer Great Britain and the ideal of what we should each aim to become. Billy is asked to talk about his “hawk”, and is asked to write key words onto the black board in chalk. Loach lingers in the mid-shot, surveying the room, capturing the interest and the relation each child can feel towards Billy and his bird, cutting to close-ups of a number of Billy’s classmates to emphasise how their usually jovial and talkative characters have become glued to Billy’s story. Then, like a bang in the head, Loach finally moves into a close-up of the hero, his downtrodden, reserved and very straightforward way of presenting his passion making for one of the saddest moments imaginable as he looks out of the window towards pastures new that shall never come; the horrors of a life beaten to a pulp by societal inequality etched in his face as the camera forces us to acknowledge that this will be his only moment in the sun.

“They’re not bothered about us and we’re not bothered about them” Billy soon thereafter exclaims to the same teacher, the reality of which rings through your ears. Billy is alone. His destiny is mapped onto a world of dictatorial rule and the violent reactions it brings, this representation completing its journey from relateable youth to devastating truth.

Perhaps no one in the history of cinema has been able to capture the loneliness of the working/under-class like Ken Loach, and the sadness his film radiates here is incomparable in his or any other filmmaker’s work. To many Brits, whether they be from the film’s setting of Yorkshire or elsewhere, Kes is an undisputed classic, and even 50 years on it remains a remarkable achievement.

Kes (1969) is one of the premiere British films ever made. A bold, critical, moving masterpiece from one of the true masters of the form.

24/24