Ken Loach's suitably scruffy portrait of an English working-class Catholic family, the head of which is permanently on the dole, intermittently on odd (even illicit) jobs, trying to scrape together sufficient quid to do up his daughter proud for her one and only First Communion. The material most closely connected to the coming milestone is the most acutely affecting: ordering the best dress (and best accoutrements) that money can buy, while the silent daughter absorbingly looks on; explaining to her, none too well, the significance of the Lord's Supper ("Why couldn't He just run away?"). The rest of the material ranges from the mildly humorous to the brutally dramatic to the no less brutally didactic. All the people (Bruce Jones, Ricky Tomlinson, Julie Brown, principally) remain tangibly real even when yoked into transporting the political views of their director. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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