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Following his Golden Bear winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Romanian writer-director Radu Jude wowed critics again with the satire Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival earlier this year and won the Special Jury Prize. Wild, hilarious and cryptically profound, it’s a beautiful oddity that solidifies Jude’s name as one of the most creative and bracingly contemporary filmmakers working today.

At the recently concluded Filmfest Hamburg, we had the chance to speak with him about the creation of images, the merits of Tiktok and judging films with Kristen Stewart.

The Film Stage: This is a pretty remarkable film. When you finished it, did you have the feeling that you’d done something special?

Radu Jude: I didn’t know. There are things in the film that I haven’t done before or I haven’t seen done before,...

Over 50 years since the debut of his first feature film, 1967’s “Poor Cow,” acclaimed filmmaker Ken Loach continues to add to his incredible filmography. And his next film is “The Old Oak,” which continues what Loach does best—telling humanist stories about the struggles that complicate the lives of people.

Read More: Summer 2023 Movie Preview: 52 Must-See Films To Watch

As seen in the trailer for “The Old Oak,” the film tells the story of a once-thriving mining community that is struggling to stay afloat.

Continue reading ‘The Old Oak’ Trailer: Acclaimed Filmmaker Ken Loach Returns With A Tale Of A Small Town Welcoming Refugees at The Playlist.

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...

What could well be Ken Loach’s final film has as much fire and fury as his debut Poor Cow did in 1967, if we discount his pioneering TV work in the run-up. The visual style hasn’t changed a great deal in the years since, but that’s because the British movie veteran, soon to turn 87, isn’t much fussed about surfaces, it’s the inner lives of his characters that he wants to capture. In that respect, The Old Oak would make a fitting swansong, capping the recent North-East trilogy with a vital film that is clearly the work of the team behind previous Cannes Competition hits I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You.

The setting is Easington, County Durham, and the year is 2016. Curiously, the Brexit Referendum is never mentioned, but the sentiments that fueled the pro-Leave movement certainly are. It opens with a coach party of...

On a recent morning in Cannes, Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan sat over coffee at the Hotel Martinez and recalled a phone call he received nearly 60 years ago, not long after he’d made a splash on the British folk scene. On the other end of the line was a rising screenwriter and director called Ken Loach. “He said he was making his first feature…and would I help him with the music?” Donovan told Variety.

The film, a kitchen sink drama called “Poor Cow,” based on a novel by British playwright and author Neil Dunn, tells the story of a working-class single mother leading a hard-luck life in the slums of London. It’s a movie that set the tone for the type of social drama that propelled Loach throughout a remarkable, prolific career.

This week at the Cannes Film Festival, Loach will bow what he says will be his final film,...

Well Go USA Entertainment has taken North American distribution rights to “Mercy Road,” a new psychological thriller from Arclight Films. The film stars Australian actor Luke Bracey, who was most recently seen in Baz Lurhman’s “Elvis” and the re-make of “Point Break.” “Mercy Road” follows a flawed everyman who commits an impulsive and vicious crime. In this journey to redemption, he discovers how far he is willing to go to save his child.

It was written and directed by John Curran, the director of such acclaimed dramas as “Chappaquiddick” and “The Painted Veil.” Chris Pelletier and Jesse Heffring penned the script. Susie Porter (“Cargo”) and Huw Higginson (“The Nightingale”) co-star with Toby Jones (“Poor Cow”). Well Go USA will release “Mercy Road” in late 2023.

The film is produced by Arclight Films’ chairman Gary Hamilton, Ying Ye and Michelle Krumm. Filmmaker Alex Proyas, Penny Karlin and Daniaile Jarry are also producers.

EastEnders actor Anna Karen is said to have leftt the majority of her fortune to one of her co-stars.

The actor, who also appeared in sitcom On the Buses, died in a house fire in February 2022, aged 85.

It’s now been reported by the Mail that Karen left 65 per cent of her estate to Sophie Lawrence, who played Diane Butcher in the BBC soap.

Lawrence first appeared in the soap from 1988 to 1991, but has returned numerous times over the years. Her most recent appearance was in 2012. Karen played Aunt Sal in the series.

Karen and Lawrence remained friends, with the pair also starring together in comedy show Bazaar & Rummage, which is based on the Sue Townsend book.

Elsewhere, the documents reveal Karen split the remainder of her fortune to her stepdaufghter, Gloria Gill, two friends and the Actors’ Benevolent Fund.

As well as On the Buses and EastEnders, Karen’s...

Poor Cow: Koch Devises Solemn Melodrama of a Tortured Romance

Delivering a steady handed narrative as full of sincerity as it is austerity, Swiss director Michael Koch blends nature metaphors with human suffering in his sophomore film A Piece of Sky (Drii Winter). The Swiss German title perhaps more effectively conjures the passage of time, in which a love blossoms, fades and dies between two villagers in a Swiss alpine village unequipped to deal with a fatal health issue tearing them apart. On paper, it sounds like any number of films we’ve seen before, but Koch takes a more estranged and distilled approach, boiling his narrative down to gestures rather than the significant emotional turnout generally mined in these scenarios.…...

Exclusive: Poppy Delevingne (Riviera) is to co-star opposite Alex Pettyfer (Magic Mike) in biopic The Chelsea Cowboy, based on the life of actor, gangster and lothario John Bindon.

Suicide Squad and Hobbs & Shaw star Idris Elba has boarded the production as executive producer.

Delevingne will play the role of aristocrat, model, actress and original It girl Lady Victoria Hodge, who provided Bindon with access to the high life the working class boy craved. The glamorous couple endured a thirteen-year tumultuous relationship that defined Bindon’s life and serves as the backbone of the story.

UK outfit Moviehouse is repping world sales on the film at Cannes. Ben Cookson (Waiting for Anya) will direct.

Bindon was spotted in a London pub by Ken Loach who asked him to star in his film Poor Cow in 1967 and went on to play a violent mobster alongside Mick Jagger in Performance (1970) and a London...

Exclusive: Magic Mike and I Am Number Four star Alex Pettyfer is attached to star in The Chelsea Cowboy, based on the colorful life of Brit actor, tough guy and lothario, John Bindon.

The project will chart the rise and fall of underworld hard-man turned actor Bindon, who despite a successful acting career and passionate romantic liaisons with various socialites, was unable to leave his criminal past behind.

Ben Cookson (Waiting For Anya) is directing. World sales are being handled by Moviehouse Entertainment which is introducing the title to buyers at this week’s virtual European Film Market.

Bindon was frequently in trouble as a youth for getting into fights and spent time in borstal. He was spotted in a London pub by Ken Loach who asked him to star in his film Poor Cow in 1967 and went on to play a violent mobster alongside Mick Jagger in Performance (1970) and...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: A screening of Abel Gance's Napoléon at the Paramount Theatre Oakland in 2012. (Photo by San Francisco Silent Film Festival.)In partnership with the Cinémathèque Française and the French National Film Board, Netflix will be financing a new restoration of Abel Gance's 1927 silent epic Napoléon ahead of the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's death this summer. The film has been restored many times before, but this restoration aims to bring to life Gance's 7-hour "Apollo cut," named after the Apollo Theatre where the film screened in 1927. Beanpole filmmaker Kantemir Balagov has found his next project: An HBO series adaptation of the hit zombie video game series, The Last of Us. Bong Joon-ho will head the main jury of this year's Venice Film Festival, marking the first time a South Korean director has been picked...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Ken Loach's Poor Cow is showing on Mubi starting January 9, 2021 in the United Kingdom in the series First Films First.An aesthetic of Swinging London is established only to have its seams split in Poor Cow, Ken Loach’s first feature film from 1967. Donovan’s melancholic soundtrack is spiked with bright British Invasion b-sides, London’s industrial neighborhoods filmed in pop-art palettes, and Joy, played by Carol White, is lucent blonde with a fringe and bouffant. Halfway into the film, dressed in a mod-print floral housecoat, Joy finds her bouffant hair-piece destroyed, unhelpfully washed by her toddler as she overslept. The deflated hair-piece which Joy despairingly “can’t go out without!” and cost her “five and eleven” demarks Joy’s status in the narrative; a single, working-class mother with no way to get by but her looks. It...

Above: Us one sheet for Kes.With Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You opening in the U.S. next week, I thought it would be as good as time as ever to look back over the posters for one of Britain’s greatest living filmmakers. Starting in 1965 with a celebrated series of docudramas for the BBC, Loach, now 83, has been making films for over half a century and has won the Palme d’Or not once but twice. Between Poor Cow in 1967 and Sorry We Missed You in 2019 he has directed 25 feature films, mostly concerned with the lives and labors of the British working class. But the problem with going through Loach’s impressive filmography in posters is that, for the most part, the posters for his later films just aren’t that interesting. There is something about Loach’s urgent, low-key social realism that doesn’t really lend itself to particularly interesting design.

Other new openers include Ken Loach’s ‘Sorry We Missed You’.

Stephen King adaptation Doctor Sleep becomes the latest title to try and end Joker’s run at the top of the UK box office this weekend (both are Warner Bros titles).

Directed by Mike Flanagan, Doctor Sleep is an adaptation of King’s 2013 novel, a sequel to 1977’s The Shining.

The narrative is set several decades after the events of The Shining, as an adult Dan Torrance meets a young girl with similar powers and tries to protect her from a cult known as The True Knot.

There have...

Ken Loach has returned to Cannes after winning the Palme d’Or for I, Daniel Blake back in 2016. Loach has been consistently churning out social realist films dealing with the plight of men and women who are either neglected or exploited by the state. At the age of 82, it would appear that he shows no sign of stopping and his new film Sorry We Missed You sees him on excellent form.

The film is set in Newcastle and tells the story of Ricky Turner (Kris Hitchen) and his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood). Long gone are the hedonistic and carefree times when they met at a rave in Manchester (Ricky’s home town). Now, they are struggling to pay the rent and bring up their two children. When Ricky decides to become a parcel delivery guy and his boss tells him all the things he should avoid – losing his scanner, getting behind with deliveries,...

Running from 1- 14 November in London before taking highlights around the country with its annual UK Tour, the festival will feature an in-depth special focus entitled A Slice of Everyday Life, along with an exciting mix of UK and International premieres, guests and events across a diverse set of strands; Cinema Now, Women’s Voices, Indie Firepower, Contemporary Classics, Artists Video, Animation and Shorts.

Korea is regularly in the world news cycle of late due to some tense international political

machinations. This year’s festival moves from this global outlook to an intimate view of the dayto-day lives and struggles of the people of the country on the ground. The 13th London Korean Film Festival proudly presents a programme that incorporates and engages with many of the topical conversations taking place in society today, through the international language of cinema.

Highlighting the festival’s dual commitment to championing the work...

No one can say that Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh delivers the same movie time after time. In an eclectic three-decade career, he has directed crowd-pleasing all-star vehicles (“Ocean’s 11,” “Magic Mike”), action comedies (“Logan Lucky,” “Out of Sight”), political dramas (“Traffic,” “Che”), micro-mini experimental works (“Schizopolis,” “The Bubble,”) and even a film starring porn actress Sasha Grey (“The Girlfriend Experience”).

SEEOscar Best Director Gallery: Every Winner In Academy Award History

His latest film, “Unsane,” probably falls into the “experimental” category. Despite the presence of Golden Globe-winning actress Claire Foy (“The Crown”), this story of a young woman who accidentally checks herself into a mental institution was not filmed in a conventional manner. Soderbergh shot “Unsure” on an iPhone 7 Plus in 4K, using the app FiLMiC Pro, a far cry from one of his big-budget studio films such as “Ocean’s 11.” But that’s a dramatic example of just who Soderbergh is and why he matters.

8 December 1967 While praising Terence Stamp’s acting, along with parts of the dialogue, Richard Roud finds Poor Cow ‘downright awful’

If I hadn’t seen Poor Cow (London Pavilion) with my own eyes, I would never have believed that a film with so much to offer could ultimately be so downright awful. I never saw any of the television films by the writer-director team, Nell Dunn and Kenneth Loach; Up the Junction was supposed to have been quite something, and there were moments in Poor Cow that hinted at a really penetrating examination of the mentality of the petty criminal.

Related: Poor Cow review – Ken Loach's debut masterpiece, still so fresh and artful

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Kenji Mizoguchi, Jirí Brdecka tributes planned for 52nd edition.

The 52nd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (June 30 - July 8) will present a Crystal Globe for outstanding contribution to world cinema to British director Ken Loach.

The award will be shared with his long-time screenwriter Paul Laverty. The pair have collaborated on twelve feature films and two shorts, including The Wind That Shakes The Barley and more recently the Palme d’Or and Bafta-winning I, Daniel Blake.

Loach has a long and fruitful relationship with the Karlovy Vary festival. In 1968, his feature debut Poor Cow won a special jury prize and best actress for its star Carol White. A year later, his second film Kes won the festival’s Crystal Globe, and he has been a guest at the festival on numerous occasions since.

Poor Cow

Karlovy Vary will also celebrate the work of composer James Newton Howard, whose credits include Pretty Woman, The Sixth Sense, [link...

Miloš Forman, right, will be celebrated by short season. Photo: Courtesy of London Czech Centre The Czech Centre in London is showcasing a short season of films to mark the 85th birthday of Czech director Miloš Forman from April 22 to 30.

The events will also explore the principles - such as the importance of the everyday, the rejection of cinematic norms and the belief in artistic freedom - which Forman shared with the British Free Cinema movement by presenting his films alongside British directors such as Lindsay Anderson and Ken Loach.

Although Forman became famed for his Oscar-winning films One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (due for re-release in British cinemas on April 14) and Amadeus, he began his started his career in opposition to classic narrative cinema, using mainly non-professional actors and scripts that eschewed conventional dramatic development.

The full programme is as follows:

Sat 22 April, 5.30pm

Poor Cow - Dir: Ken Loach,...

This supercharged 1996 story of drugs, violence and growing up has lost none of its edge ahead of the release of sequel T2

Prior to the guys’ Take-That-style reunion in the forthcoming sequel T2, here is a very welcome big-screen rerelease of Danny Boyle’s original Trainspotting, 21 years on. It holds up terrifically well. This movie was the first, maybe the only successful 90s British attempt at answering films like Goodfellas or Pulp Fiction; it has a version of their spirit and power – and matches them for hardcore violence, horror and drugs. But John Hodge’s screenplay, taken from the novel by Irvine Welsh, brings in a grittily British kind of social-realist pessimism. Watching it again, especially during the periodic “family” scenes in pubs after court appearances and funerals, I thought of Ken Loach’s Poor Cow.

Trainspotting is supercharged with sulphurous humour and brutal recklessness: it charges at you like...

Brexit of Champions: Loach’s Unadorned Blue Collar Melodrama Rages against the Machine

As he has been doing since he became an auteur of note in the late 1960s with docudrama shorts and the features Poor Cow (1967) and Kes (1969), Ken Loach continues to explore the precarious state of existence within the confines of social realism with I, Daniel Blake.

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This powerful parable about the failings of the benefits system avoids irony and cynicism and treats its troubled characters with humour and humanity

At the age of 80, Ken Loach returns to an arena of British social outrage he first occupied with pictures such as Poor Cow and Cathy Come Home; he and screenwriter Paul Laverty take up the idea that the benefits system has been repurposed as the 21st-century workhouse in our age of austerity: made deliberately grim, to deter or design out all but the most deserving poor. This movie won Loach his second Palme d’Or at Cannes, and has already become renowned for a brutal scene showing the secret visceral shame of a food bank. Maybe, in years to come, this sequence will become as famous as Charlie Chaplin and the edible shoe. But there are no laughs, only horror and anger.

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By Tim Greaves

Director John Mackenzie's powerful and captivating 1972 kitchen sink drama Made has been given the opportunity to find a new audience via a tasty UK Blu-Ray release from Network Distributing.

Valerie Marshall (Carol White) is a single mother eking out a meagre living as a London telephone exchange operator whilst simultaneously caring for her multiple-sclerosis-stricken mother (Margery Mason). Seemingly destined never to find true happiness and weary of the inapposite attentions of would-be suitors, Valerie agrees to assist priest and family friend Father Dyson (John Castle) in chaperoning a bunch of underprivileged youths on a day trip to the seaside. There she meets folk singer Mike Preston (Roy Harper), whose outwardly relaxed approach to life just might pave her way to salvation.

A slightly ponderous and largely dispiriting snapshot of early 1970s lower class Britain, I'll openly confess that when I first saw Made I was convinced it would leave me cold.

Ah, August, that glorious month when summer officially overstays its welcome and everyone begins praying for a respite from the blistering temperatures. With kids staying home on summer break and working stiffs having already blown through their vacation days by mid-June, there's no better time for an extended hunker-down in the living room. Netflix teams with Baz Luhrmann for a frenetic new birth-of-hip-hop drama, David Cross gives his acerbic State of the Union address in a new special, and a recent Coen brothers masterpiece comes online. Top off that iced...

★★★★☆ 1967 was the year of Carry On Doctor, Quatermass and the Pit and two James Bond movies. It also saw the feature debut of acclaimed television director Kenneth Loach with Poor Cow, starring Terence Stamp, fresh from his first brush of Hollywood fame and Carol White, who had starred in the television drama Cathy Comes Home that had propelled both its star and director into the national limelight. Based on Nell Dunn's novel - Loach had used her work before in another Wednesday Play Up the Junction - Poor Cow tells the story of Joy (White), a working class young mother whose progress through life seems beset with woes.

Loach’s 1967 drama is vividly evocative of its time and place, with superb performances and an effortless scene-by-scene swing

Ken Loach’s Poor Cow from 1967 – his debut film, in fact – now looks more than ever like his key early masterpiece. It has an extraordinary freshness and openness, and an effortless scene-by-scene swing in the story that hardly seems like a story at all. To see it rereleased on the cinema screen after 50 years is a vividly detailed time-capsule experience. Its artistry is only augmented by its archival interest, and it was all I could do not to stand up and try to walk forward into the screen, like Alice through a kind of looking glass, and enter a London not so very different from Dickens’s – especially the staggering tenement scenes – or even Henry Fielding’s. Every shot shows how Loach and his cinematographer Bryan Probyn had an extraordinary eye for ambient period detail.

Released in 1967, Poor Cow was Ken Loach’s first cinema feature, after a string of successful TV productions. Adapted from a novel by Nell Dunn (whose earlier short story collection, Up the Junction, had already been filmed by Loach), Poor Cow featured Terence Stamp as a robber who starts a relationship with a single mother, played by Carol White (who again had previously collaborated with Loach, on Cathy Come Home). Poor Cow is released on 24 June, with Terence Stamp and Nell Dunn attending a preview screening on 23 June at the Barbican, London

• Warning: this clip contains scenes of domestic violence

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Ken Loach, whose latest film I, Daniel Blake is screening at Cannes, is the subject of Versus, a new documentary directed by Louise Osmond, which examines the full breadth of his 50-year career. An avowedly political film-maker, Loach first made his mark with TV plays in the mid-60s, before turning to cinema with features such as Poor Cow and Kes. He has been a favourite of the Cannes selectors for decades, and won the top award in 2006 for The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach is released on 3 June

Read Peter Bradshaw’s review of I, Daniel Blake

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Because the McU is into “very expensive nostalgia”

Sharon Stone revealed on The Late Late Show last Thursday that she’s joining the McU, and while she had no details to share because of a confidentiality agreement, she said that it’s a “wee” part. Now, that could just be in reference to the size of her role, or it could be a sneaky hint that she’s actually playing a miniaturizing superhero.

Namely Janet van Dyne, aka the original version of The Wasp.

There are good reasons why that guess is a bad one. Ant-Man and The Wasp, which is where the character would appear, doesn’t begin filming until summer 2017 for a July 2018 release, and while it’s possible such a significant part has already been cast, or at least is in the stages of being cast, Stone made it sound like she’s doing the movie “now,” as...

Oscar-winning cinematographer worked on Kes, The Killing Fields and The Reader among others.

British cinematographer Chris Menges is to receive a lifetime achievement award at Camerimage (Nov 14-21), the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography.

Menges will attend the 23rd edition of Camerimage in the Polish city of Bydgoszcz to accept the award, introduce screenings of his films and will meet with the festival’s audience.

Across a 50-year career, Menges has won two Academy Awards for Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields in 1985, for which he also won a BAFTA, and The Mission in 1987.

More recently, he was Oscar-nominated (with Roger Deakins) for his work on Stephen Daldry’s The Reader in 2010.

Menges began his career in the 1960s as camera operator for documentaries by Adrian Cowell and for films like Poor Cow by Ken Loach and If… by Lindsay Anderson.

He returned to work with Loach on Kes, which marked...

He was the star of some of the decade’s most memorable films – and dated some of its most beautiful women. With the reissue of 1967’s Far From the Madding Crowd, the actor talks about his friendship with Michael Caine and his topsy-turvy career

Terence Stamp sticks his head round the door and opens his mouth. How will this legend of British acting introduce himself? What pearl of wisdom will he divulge? Stamp, self-confessed “decadent” and former holder of the title of world’s best-looking man (1963-1969) speaks: “Gotta take a slash, man. Where’s the gents?” Having been pointed in the right direction, Stamp returns, visibly relieved.

It’s funny how things work out. Now 76, Stamp had a fantastic 1960s, during which he starred in a handful of imperishable classics (Billy Budd, Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, Pasolini’s Theorem) and consorted with some of the era’s most beautiful women (Julie Christie,...

He was the star of some of the decade’s most memorable films – and dated some of its most beautiful women. With the reissue of 1967’s Far From the Madding Crowd, the actor talks about his friendship with Michael Caine and his topsy-turvy career

Terence Stamp sticks his head round the door and opens his mouth. How will this legend of British acting introduce himself? What pearl of wisdom will he divulge? Stamp, self-confessed “decadent” and former holder of the title of world’s best-looking man (1963-1969) speaks: “Gotta take a slash, man. Where’s the gents?” Having been pointed in the right direction, Stamp returns, visibly relieved.

It’s funny how things work out. Now 76, Stamp had a fantastic 1960s, during which he starred in a handful of imperishable classics (Billy Budd, Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, Pasolini’s Theorem) and consorted with some of the era’s most beautiful women (Julie Christie,...

Welcome back to Cannes Check, In Contention's annual preview of the films in Competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off on May 14. Taking on different selections every day, we'll be examining what they're about, who's involved and what their chances are of snagging an award from Jane Campion's jury. Next up, the lineup's second Palme d'Or-winning British stalwart: Ken Loach's "Jimmy's Hall." The director: Ken Loach (British, 77 years old). Often labelled the father of British social realism on film, Ken Loach is as famed for the no-nonsense naturalism of his aesthetic as for his defiantly socialist politics -- evident to varying degrees in 26 cinematic features (narrative and documentary) over 47 years. A lower-middle-class grammar school student turned Oxford law graduate, Loach began his career in television, directing a series of socially conscious BBC teleplays -- most famously the homelessness study "Cathy Come Home" -- before making his first feature film,...

Terence Stamp Finds His Song

By Alex Simon

One of the iconic actors and faces of London’s “swinging” sixties; Terence Stamp was discovered by actor/director Peter Ustinov for the titular role in his adaptation of Melville’s “Billy Budd” in 1962. The Cockney lad from London’s notorious Bow district was thrust into the limelight almost overnight, becoming a symbol of the English working class “intelligentsia,” which helped shape that decade’s pop culture. Along with game-changers like Joe Orton, (Stamp’s former roommate) Michael Caine, and the Beatles, Stamp et al proved to the world that one needn’t have graduated with a First from Oxford to make a mark on the world.

Terence Stamp marked his 50th year in show business with the release of last year’s “Unfinished Song,” being released today on DVD and Amazon Instant Video by Anchor Bay Entertainment. Stamp plays grumpy pensioner Arthur Harris,...

Loach's long-time producer suggests Jimmy's Hall, currently on location in Ireland, may be the director's last full-length fiction film

Rebecca O'Brien, Ken Loach's producer, has suggested that Jimmy's Hall is likely to be the last feature film from the veteran director. Speaking to Screen Daily, O'Brien – who has collaborated with the 77-year-old Loach since 1990 – said: "This is probably the last narrative feature for Ken. There are a few documentary ideas kicking around, and that will probably be the way to go, but this is a serious period-drama with a lot of moving parts so it's a big thing to put together. I think we should go out while we're on top."

Jimmy's Hall will be Loach's 29th film in a career which began on TV, then moved to the big screen for 1967's Poor Cow, before attracting international attention with 1969's Kes. A drama set in 1932, the film centres on communist leader James Gralton,...

Exclusive: Jimmy’s Hall, which has begun shooting in Ireland, is likely to be Ken Loach’s last narrative feature - but he will continue to direct documentaries.

Ken Loach’s upcoming drama, Jimmy’s Hall, will likely be his last, according to regular producer Rebecca O’Brien.

“This is probably the last narrative feature for Ken,” O’Brien told ScreenDaily. “There are a few documentary ideas kicking around, and that will probably be the way to go, but this is a serious period-drama with a lot of moving parts so it’s a big thing to put together. I think we should go out while we’re on top.”

O’Brien, who has produced more than a dozen features with Loach since 1990, said that the 77 year-old director is likely to continue to make documentaries and TV work but that he is “unlikely” to make another narrative feature.

“It’s such a huge operation and Ken doesn...

Exclusive: Jimmy’s Hall, which has begun shooting in Ireland, is likely to be Ken Loach’s last narrative feature - but he will continue to direct documentaries.

Ken Loach’s upcoming drama, Jimmy’s Hall, will likely be his last, according to regular producer Rebecca O’Brien.

“This is probably the last narrative feature for Ken,” O’Brien told ScreenDaily. “There are a few documentary ideas kicking around, and that will probably be the way to go, but this is a serious period-drama with a lot of interconnecting elements so it’s a big thing to put together. I think we should go out while we’re on top.”

O’Brien, who has produced more than a dozen features with Loach since 1990, said that the 77 year-old director is likely to continue to make documentaries and TV work but that he is “unlikely” to make another narrative feature.

“It’s such a huge operation and Ken doesn...

Terence Stamp | Southend Film Festival | Sci-Fi London | Rooftop Film Club

Terence Stamp, London

His beauty is often admired before his acting skills, but while the former has faded somewhat the latter survives, at least when Stamp isn't topping up the retirement fund with another offhand baddie role. Those dodgier movies have thankfully been omitted from this selective retrospective (don't worry, Superman II is still in there). He lit up the screen, and the 1960s, with early films such as Billy Budd, The Collector, Far From The Madding Crowd, Poor Cow and Theorem, then took an extended break in an Indian ashram. Since his return to the day job, he's reminded us what he can do, in The Hit, The Adventures Of Priscilla Queen Of The Desert, even last year's Song For Marion. He's a terrific writer and talker, too, which should make his on-stage interview (8 May) a hot ticket.

BFI Southbank,...

Ken Loach missed the memo about not speaking ill of the dead. The British socialist director behind films such as "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" and "Poor Cow" slammed Margaret Thatcher in a statement calling her "the most divisive and destructive Prime Minister of modern times." Thatcher, who was the United Kingdom's first and only female prime minister, died Monday at the age of 87. While she was in power, Thatcher clashed with the labor movement over her belief in deregulation and push to privatize state-owned companies. Loach suggested that any...

Ken Loach's The Angels' Share gets underway as a hard-hitting squint at the unemployed of Glasgow before rather perversely turning into an uplifting crime caper with a Disneyesque finale. But maybe, just maybe, a little Walt is what the have-nots are crying out for right now.

Loach, who has been zeroing in on the working class for over 45 years (Poor Cow (1967); Riff-Raff (1991)), and his longtime screenwriter Paul Laverty (The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006)) have concocted a group of societal misfits who've all wound up in court and sentenced to community service.

One, Albert (Gary Maitland), is a dull-witted hard drinker who's been arrested for plummeting onto some train tracks; another, kleptomaniac Mo (Jasmine Riggins), has filched a macaw; and a third, Rhino (William Ruane), has continuously affronted public statuary, sometimes with urine. But our main Cinderella/hero here is Robbie (Paul Brannigan).

With a scar down one cheek...

Steven Soderbergh became the poster child for new American independent cinema in the 90′s, after winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his debut feature Sex, Lies, & Videotape. Soderbergh spent the better part of the ensuing decade, directing small idiosyncratic films, and often wearing many hats including producer, screenwriter, cinematographer and editor. Eventually the director entered into a period that saw him make commercially satisfying films; most notably Ocean’s Eleven, Erin Brockovich and Traffic, the latter of which earned him an Oscar for Best Director. Despite his box office success, Steven Sodberergh continued to experiment with such films as the ensemble piece Full Frontal, the smart and ambiguous Solaris, the low-budget Bubble and the four hour long epic, Che. There are very few filmmakers who are able to keep their feet firmly planted in the commercial world, while conserving their independent spirit. With his last...

British filmmaker Ken Loach has been around for nearly half a century, starting as a television director in England before his first feature, Poor Cow, starring Carol White and Terence Stamp, in 1967. And in all that time, the man’s never broken out into the mainstream, nowhere near a household name in any household outside of his immediate country and the lovely South of France, where he won the Palme d’Or a few years back for his small wartime masterpiece The Wind That Shakes The Barley.

This is an artist who has boldly refused to compromise his creative vision, and that vision is in proper display here, with The Angel’s Share. These days, Loach usually alternates between ultra-serious and decidedly light-hearted social commentary; this new film sits in the latter group. Starring Paul Brannigan as Robbie, a thug with a heart of gold, Loach digs into the current...

The leftwing film director talks about the riots, his early work on television and the documentary he made for Save the Children 40 years ago that is about to be screened for the first time

About halfway through our interview, I call Ken Loach a sadist. The mild-mannered, faintly mole-like film director blinks hard, chuckles, and carries on. We are discussing a key aspect of his film-making: the element of surprise. Loach has spent his career depicting ordinary people, telling working-class stories as truthfully as possible, and he works distinctively – filming each scene in order, often using non-professional actors, encouraging improvisation.

They don't tend to see a full script in advance, and move through his films as confused as the audience about what lurks around the next corner. I ask Loach which surprise was most memorable, and he laughs incongruously through a few examples. He talks about an incident when an actor walked through a door,...

Channel kitchen-sink drama A Taste of Honey as you stroll down the Manchester ship canal or gaze wistfully from Barton Road Swing Bridge

Nothing says "Who needs Koh Samui?" quite like a few days' isolation in a poky bedsit on the outskirts of town, right? Which is why you've wisely plumped to spend your holiday abiding by the rules of the gritty British kitchen-sink drama. And why not? As Joy says at the beginning of Ken Loach's Poor Cow: "The world was our oyster … and we chose Ruislip."

Now, the good news is that you don't have to go to Ruislip. However, the bad news is that you do have to go somewhere that's not exactly known for sun, sand and surf. The east Midlands (Look Back in Anger, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), Yorkshire (Billy Liar, This Sporting Life) and Lancashire (A Kind of Loving, A Taste of Honey...

Those of you still pondering Dustin's posts on the Schreiber Theory (screenwriters are the authors of the film, not directors, as the auteur theory posits) would do yourselves a great service in watching Steven Soderbergh's The Limey (1999) and listening to the filmmaker's infamous commentary track with screenwriter Lem Dobbs (Kafka, Dark City). Dobbs, a crotchety screenwriter if there ever was one, takes Soderbergh to task for taking his character-driven noir and turning it into an exercise in stylistically driven minimalism. The screenwriter quips, and I strongly recommend Scott Tobias's breakdown of the commentary for anyone interested in the Cliff Notes version, "People ask me, 'Do you like this movie?' And as a disinterested, objective filmgoer who had nothing to do with it, I'd say it's a good movie. I'd recommend it to my friends. But as a screenwriter, I think it's crippled." The message of the overall commentary,...

Ken Loach has created his own YouTube channel, hosting several of his older features. Sixteen Films, Loach’s production company, eventually wants to convert the site into an online video-on-demand service. At present, Loach’s YouTube channel hosts three of his early features: Poor Cow and Kes – his first and second films – plus classic BBC drama Cathy Come Home, which did so much to illuminate the plight of the homeless for 60s TV viewers. The site originally hosted more titles, but rights holders asked Sixteen to take them down. Sixteen only posted the movies as a way of contacting obscure [...]...

Late Palme d'Or contender shines light on murky world of security contractors

Cannes welcomed back one of its favoured sons today, and it was Ken Loach as he is best known and loved: gritty, uncompromising and angry. Very, very angry.

The 73-year-old director was a last-minute addition to the competition for this year's Palme d'Or with his film Route Irish, named after the hazardous road that links the green zone in Baghdad to the airport.

Loach told the Guardian that he and regular collaborator Paul Laverty had been trying to find a way of addressing Iraq for some time. "Iraq, to use the old cliche, was the elephant in our sitting room for a long time," said Loach.

"The actual event, the war in Iraq, was so appalling that it takes a long time to see it in perspective." He admits that anger was a motivating force – "anger on behalf...

Populist: The column that's fed up of you telling it what it thinks

Ipad experiment of the week

Will It Shred's attempts to see if you can trick up an iPad and skate on it. Warning: warranty may be void. See it here.

Incongrous club name of the week

Stephen Hawking's Answer Phone Message featuring heavy rock and metal. Sat, London N1. Raaaaaaaagh!

YouTube Channel of the week

Ken Loach has uploaded full-length versions of Ae Fond Kiss, Kes, Cathy Come Home, Poor Cow, Riff-Raff, Hidden Agenda and Carry On Ken to YouTube. See youtube.com/user/KenLoachFilms

New trailer mystery of the week

Jj Abrams returns with a new Area 51 project titled Super 8. Steven Spielberg's on board, too. Internet explodes.

Fantasy fanzine of the week

Henry & Glenn Forever imagines what life would be like if Black Flag's Henry Rollins and Misfits' Glenn Danzig had been...

What do you get when you cross Sexy Beast with The Queen? Something like The Princess' Gangster, a new film being written by Louis Mellis, co-screenwriter of the former film as well as the recently released testosterone fest 44-Inch Chest. The plot involves the still-alleged alleged affair between Queen Elizabeth's little sister, Princess Margaret, and gangster-turned-actor John Bindon (Quadrophenia). The Hollywood Reporter, which treats the story as being completely true (and it was certainly likely), notes that Mellis was hired for the gig due to his reputation for writing very tough yet very amusing characters.

If it did really occur, the romance between the royal figure and the flamboyant thug was short lived, taking place during a few weeks in the Caribbean at some point in the mid 1970s. After her marriage to Lord Snowdon fell apart, Margaret was something of a party animal and supposedly slept with a number of famous people,...