It’s hard to say why it is that Ken Loach’s films are always assigned to the ‘art movie’ category, beyond the fact that the man’s arsenal of filmmaking tools puts that of virtually anyone else I can think of to shame, and is all the more shatteringly powerful for being devoid of gimmickry.  Loach’s movies strike one as being simplicity itself, deceptively raw and unpolished.  The characters are generally blemished, physically unattractive, run-of-the-mill, at best.  The basis for every creative decision appears to be street credibility, no false notes.  Tragedy afflicts small people, we can see it coming, there’s no orchestral music, no slow-motion deaths with quotable last utterances.  They made mistakes, got tangled up in the spokes of banal hopelessness, are doomed to pay the price and we know it happens a million times over every minute.  The fact that it rings so startlingly true, that Loach’s human beings are invariably both jovial and melancholy, caring and irresponsible, capable and helpless, reminds one of relatives and neighbours we all have... and what the hell are they doing in the movies?  The fact that watching these people on the big screen should come as the shock it clearly does to those who see My Name is Joe is a devastating commentary about the cinema’s lack of relevance to and resonance in people’s daily lives, a stark illustration of just what crap 99% of the films we are ‘given the opportunity’ to behold for 300-550 forints truly are, and how rare and precious what Ken Loach has given us is.  Peter Mullan is brilliant as a recovering alcoholic who serves as father figure to a losing football squad comprised of luckless, young, working-class men.  The Scottish neighbourhood in which they all live (presumably in Glasgow, though it’s never named) is typified that ever-so-British cocktail of chronic unemployment, drugs and thugs, which Loach returns to time and again in his movies, and which will be instantly recognizable to those who have seen such films as Raining Stones and Ladybird, Ladybird.  Though Mullan’s Joe is himself unemployed and living a hand-to-mouth existence, he manages to exude a workaday optimism and humour, having made an escape from the chemical dependency which had turned him into a veritable zombie, breaking free in the aftermath of a violent incident ten months before we meet him.  Fully aware that his luck in having been able to do so was great and rare, Joe attempts, in his own small way, to help a few young men in his community avoid fates similar to or worse than that which he had endured.