From Ken Loach, master of the everyday, a portrait of hope in the midst of despair

In the third part of Ken Loach’s unofficial trilogy of films set in the North East of England during austerity, ‘The Old Oak’ looks at what happens when immigrant families from Syria arrive in an economically depressed former coal mining town near Durham. “Oak” is set in 2016 – the year many Syrian immigrants first came to Britain – and is said to be the 87-year-old social realist filmmaker’s last film. Missed You” (2019) in the tradition of his career-long compassion for the marginalized and forgotten. It is unmistakably a Loach film: taciturn yet candid (sometimes to the point of the obvious), exploring life in the cracks of a broken society with deep compassion, frank anger and, perhaps more than in the previous two movies, a shot of hope.