‘The Old Oak’ Review: Ken Loach’s Drama Shines a Vital Light on Working-Class British Racism Until It Succumbs to Soft-Hearted Wish-Fulfillment

It looks like Matt James‘ mom might be following in his footsteps!

Lewis Capaldi reigns atop the Official Albums Chart for a second week with Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent. 

As the years march on, the importance of ABC’s “Lost” continues to shine through. This is a show that wasn’t the first of its kind—a serialized drama that captured the hearts and minds of viewers—but it was one of the most influential series of the past 30 years, full stop.

engulfing the trendy Los Angeles restaurant Horses. An assortment of things has told me, against my will, about what her and her grown-up Spy Kid husband do when they're alone together. Jameela Jamil regaling a horrified Al Roker with a tale about a .

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic “It’s been about 25 years since I stood on this stage,” since Shania Twain, not long after the kickoff to her set Sunday night at the Hollywood Bowl. She had that figured about right — the calendar shows she last played America’s most favored amphitheater on May 6, 1999. That was a few weeks shy of the moment that her signature song among all signature songs, “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!,” peaked on the charts. When she pulled it out as her inevitable final encore number Saturday, it still felt like it was cresting. It’s a song that may never have truly peaked until all the generations represented at the Bowl this Memorial Day weekend have passed away and/or the day the prerogative to have a little fun has been codified into the criminal as a felony. For as long as there are women, and gay men, and straight men relaxed with themselves enough to buy “Let’s go, girls” T-shirt and diode-blinking pink cowboy hats, Twain will own rights to the ultimate ladies’ night anthem, just as surely as she owns the federal trademark on exclamation points. (She does, doesn’t she?)

The Ultimatum: Queer Love (★★★★☆) is the latest in Netflix’s line of reality dating shows. This one is not hosted by Nick Lachey, but JoAnna Garcia Swisher, who is immediately clocked for being straight, and truthfully isn’t around that much.

Brent Lang Executive Editor Family audiences turned out in force, propelling Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” to the top of the box office over the Memorial Day weekend. The film, a live-action remake of the 1988 animated favorite, earned a splashy $117.5 million over the four-day holiday. It ranks as the fifth largest Memorial Day debut — last year’s “Top Gun: Maverick” set a new record for the holiday with its $160.5 million launch. At one point over the weekend, it looked as if “The Little Mermaid” might even open north of $120 million, but ticket sales flagged slightly. For Disney, the film’s popularity is a testament to its strategy of digging deep into its vaults and rebooting animated titles as live action movies, something it has done successfully with the likes of “Aladdin,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King.” Waiting out on the horizon: Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the Oscar-winning director of “Summer of Soul,” is helming a remake of “The Aristocats” for Disney.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor In “The Old Oak,” which played in Competition in Cannes, Ken Loach portrays a village in the North-East of England where the indigenous white community comes into conflict with Syrian refugees – a conflict fuelled by the despair, deprivation and decline of the rust-belt region. Such conditions can be a seed-bed for far right groups, the director tells Variety. Such issues have not been explored sufficiently in film and television, Loach says, and he draws a parallel with the portrayal of the rise of Nazism in Germany in the mass media. “We have endless programs about the Second World War, about the horrors of Nazism and fascism, about the racism, about the Holocaust. Quite properly, we have endless programs about that, but what they refuse to point out is that that arose from alienation, anger, feeling cheated, and finding scapegoats. And that’s how we ended up with Hitler, and that’s the ground in which the far right flourishes. One of the points of the film is to say: This is the cause of fascism. This is where it comes from. This is its seed-bed, and it comes as an inevitable consequence of our economic system. Because if the neoliberal agenda was an essential development for capitalism, to use the old-fashioned word, then that’s where fascism comes from. Implicit in that is that the far right will rise because that’s how people will be heading. And they know that and yet the mass media, the press, just turn their backs on that. They’ll tell us all about the horrors of Hitler. Sure. But they won’t tell us how he came to power. And that’s the huge lesson. And we see it in essence now all the time.”

The Old Oak will be his last.Speaking at a press conference for his new movie at the Cannes Film Festival, Loach was asked by Deadline whether reports about his retirement are true.“One day at a time,” he responded. “If you get up in the morning, and you’re not in the obituary column; one day at a time.”It comes after he told The Hollywood Reporter last month that “it would be hard to do a feature film again” because “your facilities do decline.”He said: “Films take a couple of years and I’ll be nearly 90,” he said of a potential next movie.

A 17th century pub in Bury has gone on sale with an eye-watering price tag of £1 million. The Church Inn, in Birtle, understood to be one of the oldest in Greater Manchester, comes with four acres of stunning land, gardens and car parking.

Ken Loach still has more to say against The Man in society with his cinema, that was clear coming away from the Cannes press conference for his latest movie The Old Oak.

By Hanna RantalaCANNES (Reuters) - Ken Loach said on Friday he does not know if "The Old Oak," the 86-year-old British director's attempt to win the Cannes Film Festival's top prize for a third time, would be his last. "Oh, I don't know, I live day by day," said Loach, who turns 87 in June. "If you read the obituary columns and you're not in them, it's a good day.

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.

Dennis Harvey Film Critic Released to theaters in the theatrical dog days of mid-2020, Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion’s “Becky” became a home-formats hit, its gleefully tasteless home-invasion thrills a guilty-pleasure tonic for COVID captives going a bit stir-crazy. Now Lulu Wilson is back as that title character, more or less the sole survivor of her prior screen outing. You can be sure in “The Wrath of Becky” that age hasn’t dulled her pissed-off homicidal verve, and that fate will surely provide another crop of ne’er-do-wells to tempt its exercise.  However, a different writing-directing duo is in charge this time, Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote. Their efforts generate rewards that are somewhat diminished, if still diverting. Quiver is releases this SXSW-premiered sequel to U.S. theaters, with home-formats dates as yet unannounced. 

Only nine directors have ever won the Palme d’Or twice. Francis Ford Coppola did it in the ’70s with The Conversation and Apocalypse Now. Ruben Östlund joined the club last year after following The Square with Triangle of Sadness. But this year, there is a very real possibility that, at 86, Ken Loach may go above and beyond that by winning a third Palme for his new film, The Old Oak. Loach first won in 2006 with the historical Irish drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley, then doubled up in 2016 with I, Daniel Blake, a caustic study of Britain’s healthcare crisis. After that came Sorry, We Missed You, a no-less withering look at the punitive gig economy. Like the latter two films, The Old Oak is set in the North East of England and completes an unofficial trilogy, this time with a slightly more optimistic bent. Like all of Loach’s output since 1996, it was written by Paul Laverty, and the pair sat down with Damon Wise to discuss the film’s themes of humanity and social responsibility.

Already a big enough hit in the U.K. to earn a second season, anyone who has watched even a few minutes of the NBA Playoffs on TNT has seen the ubiquitous ads for “The Lazarus Project,” premiering June 4th, and probably wondered what the heck is going on.

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about cooking as a form of care, an idea intrinsically linked to the feminist revaluation of the work usually performed by women, which is most often unremunerated yet essential to day-to-day living.

Guy Lodge Film Critic All of life, including death, is in the lengthy, unbroken shot that opens Thien An Pham’s bewitching debut feature “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.” We begin on the sidelines of a local soccer match in Saigon’s city center, observing the play from a cool distance before following a shuffling mascot, dressed in a wolf suit, to the adjoining bar. There, crowds watch a 2018 World Cup fixture while a group of young men, turned from the TV, drink and discuss matters of faith, existence and ennui. Thien (Le Phong Vu) is quiet and morose, only half-invested in a conversation already beset with distractions: the sales pitch of a bubbly beer rep, the burst of a sudden summer thunderstorm, a metallic screech and grim thump as the camera again drifts serenely over to reveal the aftermath of a fatal motorcycle crash. In the ensuing rhubarb of bystander concern, Thien stays put.

Cordon bleu is the warmest color in Tràn Anh Hùng’s long but surprisingly light soufflé of a movie, a highly watchable Aga saga that’s so artful, charming and non-boat-rockingly old-school that it might make you wonder, even in a non-ironic way, what Lasse Hallström has been up to lately. In Cannes film festivals gone by, it could arguably have provoked the bidding war of the fortnight, given the track record of such foodie faves as Le Grand Bouffe, Babette’s Feast and Eat Drink Man Woman, which also debuted on the Croisette. But that’s faint praise for a story that, although it’s almost all about fillings, trimmings and toppings, doesn’t seem to have that much content or, more importantly, depth.

Christopher Vourlias 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.