My Name Is Joe

UK 1998, 105 minutes
Dir. Ken Loach
Rating: [M]
Genres: Drama / Romance

Aroview: Dir. Ken Loach revisits his mainstay - the not-working-class of urban Britain, this time extending further north to the slums of Glasgow.

Winning Best Actor at Cannes, Peter Mullen plays an unemployed, recovering alcoholic whose heartfelt romance with a family-planning counsellor is unstabilised by his loyalty to a vulnerable lad with a junkie wife and a serious debt to the local mob. Nobody does human frailty like Loach, and aside from his renown for getting uniformly brilliant performances, his skill as a director invests almost every scene with incidental detail, poetic grace and narrative economy as well as his customary social conscience and command of absolute truth.

NZ International Film Festival 1999

Member Reviews

Average rating (Exceptional). Showing 1-1 of 1 member reviews.

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5 stars (Exceptional) Reformed alcoholic and handyman Joe falls for Sarah, a local social worker, when she employs him to do a job. From different worlds, it's an unlikely pairing and Joe's demons from the past threaten to ruin everything. Powerful, a really touching film. ~GenXGirl