Dave Johns in I, Daniel Blake.
Ken Loach's latest piece of social realism is actually a Victorian melodrama in which the British state takes the place of the mustachioed landlord or brutal factory owner. Dave Johns, in a low-key performance that anchors the film, plays Dan, a hard-working Newcastle carpenter who has suffered a heart attack on a job site but is deemed fit to work by a social-service agency that mainly seems intent on reducing the numbers on its books. In its unfriendly offices, he meets an equally baffled single mother (Hayley Squires) whom he takes under his wing. Loach meticulously tracks the Catch-22s that force the injured or the unlucky into poverty – there is one heartbreaking scene in a food bank – but ultimately this political film's sentimentality and transparency detract from its power.
Kate Taylor