I, Daniel Blake is a Ken Loach film about a Newcastle joiner who can’t work but faces a welfare bureaucracy that won’t listen, humiliates him, grinds him down, so it’s fun, fun, fun all the way. Yes, it is that Ken Loach film, but as that Ken Loach film is more powerful than most other films — and this is fearsomely moving (I cried), and fearsomely tender (I cried again) — you’re just going to have to suck it up.
It has been 50 years since Cathy couldn’t come home and 47 years since Billy buried that bird at the bottom of the garden and while Loach has strayed into other genres — the magical realism of Looking for Eric, for instance — his best work has always captured the daily lives of ordinary people whose heart, humanity and humour are their only weapons against a system that plain doesn’t care.
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