Raining Stones (Ken Loach, 1993)

Hapless unemployed family man Bob stumbles from one paltry scam to another in a desperate attempt to scrape enough money together for his daughter's first communion. This being baseline Loach, the outlook is poor and misfortunes will come in droves. You can't fault the director for his honesty and indignation, but they do tend to detract from the drama, by sheer dint of making the chain of events rather predictable, i.e. going from bad to worse, with the supporting turn by the omnipresent Ricky Tomlinson adding the usual instances of earthy humour but not allowed to deflect the downward trajectory. Still, it's nice that Loach restrains himself from shooting fish in a barrel with the giant target of the Catholic church, Bob more a victim of his own subservience to it than the indoctrination of the institution itself, his half-cooked schemes similarly the main cause of his downfall above and beyond crippling societal circumstances, which are usually Loach's primum mobile for all evil. The plot also veers away from pat determinism in the end, good being as likely to transpire as bad given enough time.

6/10