Popular reviews

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ★★★★★ 11

  A story about a boy training a kestrel during his free time, this is not.

  Ken Loach is perhaps the most important socialist name amidst the filmmakers that created and encouraged the disillusionment towards modern society through the Kitchen Sink Realism. Member of the UK Labour Party for more than three decades, a party responsible for banning the death penalty, the inauguration of the comprehensive education system and the Open University, and for the abolition of theater censorship (all of this during the 60s), Kes is firmly attached to those ideals and openly criticizes the inhuman institutionalization and oppression of the working class of its time.

  The most important (and obvious) source of inspiration for this film movement was the…

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  Review by Mark Cunliffe 🇵🇸 ★★★★★ 16

  Only his second feature, Kes remains one of Ken Loach's distinctive, largely because the working style we now associate with him was first set here.

  Gone are some of the more mannered techniques he had used in his BBC plays in favour of a more realistic, observer style that owes its roots in the Czech cinema he was so fond of.

  Also gone is the uneasy compromise he made on his first feature, Poor Cow, to include a star name in his work in the shape of Terence Stamp. From hereon in, Ken Loach films would cast non actors and amateurs, real people in lead roles and none were perhaps so distinctive as the young schoolboy David Bradley who bagged…

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  Review by AdamAB ★★★★★ 2

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Ken Loach's British New Wave masterpiece crackles with fierce authenticity. The social-realist tale of a beleaguered childhood has lost none of its power - certainly not for a South Yorkshire native such as myself - and finds both despair and humour in its portrayal of hopeless youth.  
   
  Reminiscent of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Kes centres on a rebellious adolescent burdened with a life of poverty and dispassionate authority figures. Instead of the dark streets of Paris, Loach's coming-of-age tale takes place against the backdrop of a small mining town, the predatory site of the pit lending the piece a foreboding weight of inevitability.  
   
  Billy’s turmoil artfully reflects a Northern England maligned by an uncaring establishment. Loach's…

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  Review by Christian Ryan ★★★★★ 3

  I’m not generally one to advocate for sequels, but I really need to know that Billy’s going to be alright. Maybe just a quiet little film of our boy as a well-adjusted young man, finding love and raising falcons on a farm somewhere in the lake district.

  ...or, failing that, a slasher with him using trained birds to pluck out the eyeballs of every miserable cunt that caused him grief, starting with that bellend brother of his.

  Either way, it’d be nice just to catch up.

  Kitchen Sink Ranked

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  Review by mary ★★★★★ 5

  pretty emotional but WHAT LANGUAGE WERE THEY SPEAKING??

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★★ 2

  Based on Barry Hines’ 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, this second feature from Ken Loach (following Poor Cow) paints a miserable image of Britain in the late sixties. It's stabilised by a first-time naturalistic performance by fourteen-year-old David Bradley as the charismatic delinquent Billy Casper and puts forward themes concerning social class along with other issues which continue to persist and which are pertinent and prominent within the filmmaker's filmography in general.

  It commands a view and spirit of a brutal working-class existence and never breaks faith to its concept by unfolding into any mawkish sentimentality or endeavouring to offer up any solutions, but it does manage to unearth aspects of spirit and wit in even the direst of circumstances which keeps it from developing into being remorselessly heartbreaking. Kes incorporates many compelling and memorable moments within its a realistic dramatic framework which is transmitted with a high degree of effectiveness throughout.

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  Review by Justin Peterson ★★★★½ 3

  Criterion Collection Spine #561
  (Foreign language film)

  The thoughtful and enduring story of a young outcast who discovers joy in his life through the relationship he develops with a bird.

  "But most exciting thing – when I flew her free first time, sir ... Kes! Kes! Come, Kes! Come on then! ... So, while I were walking back, I saw her flying ... She came like a bomb ... About a yard off the floor, like lightning, head still, and you couldn't hear t' wings ... and straight onto the glove – Wham!"

  Labeling Kes a foreign-language film was just a little joke, but it definitely sounded that way based on how thick the English accents were. And I did…

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 13

  Ken Loach’s “Kes” manages to tell a coming of age story with deep compassion, and without an over-reliance on sentimentality. 

  What nostalgia “Kes” does invoke isn’t from familiar songs or relatable party and classroom scenes. It comes from a remembrance back to the fear and powerlessness of youth, and the moments of fleeting self-determination that make them bearable to live through.

  While Loach’s film invariably owes a great debt to “400 Blows” and De Sica’s “Shoeshine” before it, “Kes” is a powerful enough work to be pillar of the genre on its own. 

  David Bradley as the young working-class Billy has an independence and defiance that rivals that of “Blow’s” Jean-Pierre Léaud. “Kes’s” entire theme could be conveyed in one…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black

  I just had one long emotional flashback after another as I watched a child being brutalized over and over again.

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  Review by Mark Cunliffe 🇵🇸 ★★★★★

  What makes Kes so special? Well I think Ken Loach summed it up quite brilliantly in last night's documentary Greg Davies: Looking for Kes. It lies within "The strength of the central image of a boy who is trapped training a bird that flies free"

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  Review by Jay D 's Watching ★★★★★

  The first time I watched Kes, I saw it primarily as a coming of age story, about a boy growing up and learning lessons about the world and how to get it to notice you, and how cruel it could be, for the first time via his relationship with a kestrel (or you know, if you take the kestrel as a metaphor). And it's good at that, fine really. Ken Loach does a great job, abetted by Chris Menges' cinematography, and David Bradley's Billy Casper is a terrific mix of sharp, seeing vulnerability and awkward edges. You can see the armor starting to come up around him, keeping the world out.

  What I had forgotten though, or wasn't aware of…

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  Review by Laura ★★★★ 1

  ken loach makes films that when i finish them i say to myself “i think that was good?” and then 10 minutes later i burst into tears.

  reminiscent of both ratcatcher & where is the friend’s house (which are probably my two favorite films) but in classic loach style, it doesn’t let you hold onto hope for quite as long. the classroom scene where everyone hangs on billy’s words as he tells them how he trained kes felt hopeful as i watched it, but comes back & hits you at the end when you see billy is still trapped. he wants to give something else the freedom that he doesn’t have, but is unable to do so.

  anyway you see why i am crying now 😔