Ken Loach will not go out with a whimper, still throwing the inequities of society back in our faces, even with possibly his final film. This time it's about the treatment of refugees from war zones, faced with local prejudice when dumped in a particularly depressed area. Of course Loach cannot avoid drawing parallels between the situation in Syria that the new arrivals have fled from and the miners' strike that laid waste to their new home community, but just because the subject of his ire is a familiar one, it's still relevant. There is no shying away from depicting the locals frequenting the only pub they have left as racists for the most part, but neither is the context that made them that way avoided. Yes, as is pretty much par for the course with Loach, this is a lesson in politics in the form of a fictional story, with the kindly pub landlord and determined young newcomer that he befriends not much more than cyphers for the two sides of the culture clash, but as ever the passion is palpable and justified, and no pat resolution is to be expected.
6/10
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