Kes
Peter Bradshaw
Guardian
Friday October 1, 1999

Re-released after 30 years, Ken Loach's Kes - produced by Tony Garnett, photographed by Chris Menges - is a viscerally powerful, raw, almost primitivist work, with a much rougher technical feel than the contemporary social-realist television work which made its creator's name. It is set in unswinging Barnsley in 1969 - though it could be 1959 or even '49.

Billy Casper, played by an awe-inspiringly confident non-professional David Bradley, is a boy let down by the school system who ecstatically discovers a wild kestrel and finds he can train it, imbibing the bird's dignity and self-belief. I must confess to being agnostic about Kes, on account of a strain of pious defeatism and miserabilism that appears to colour its ending. But this is a film of passionate conviction, with cracking performances from Colin Welland, Brian Glover and Lynne Perrie. The sheer idealism puts our modern cinema to shame. It is this week's must-see.

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