Wow! Such a good movie.

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

"As a white person I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage. I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group." - Peggy McIntosh"Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man." - Henry Hazlitt"Bread and Roses" was director Ken Loach's first feature to be set (and filmed?) in the United States. The film was funded by small European financiers and received limited distribution in the US. Though Loach waters down his narrative for Hollywood audiences – the film's fairly conventional, plot-wise – his customary mix of political sermonising and urgent neorealism (what he calls "socioeconomic realism", an offshoot of socialist realism) remains absolutely abhorrent to most moviegoers. For this, he remains marginalised. Its title alluding to a 1912 textile mill strikes in Massachusetts, "Bread and Roses" revolves around a workers' strike in a non-union office building in downtown Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood. Much of the film revolves around impoverished office workers and Latino immigrants, who struggle for decent wages, to keep their families together and to fight against their ethnic and professional "invisibility". Sounds familiar? Loach has been making such films for decades, but this is one of his best. He skirts around most "Coroporations vs Little Guys" clichés, and focuses instead on the ways in which underclasses prey upon themselves, and how such bickering serves only to bolster exploitation. Corporate executives and limousine liberals, who pick up humanitarian awards while relying on custodial firms who pay less than minimum wage, remain off camera, alluded to but never seen. Loach's cast is primarily composed of non-actors, but some famous faces turn up. Adrien Brody plays a young union organiser named Sham Shapiro, and exudes a nice mix of likability, scruffy dissidence and intolerable smugness, his character self-righteously mouthing union maxims from the safety of suburbia. He organises the workers, helps them unionize, but they take all the risks, and his sheltered, financially stable life-style is far removed from their squalor. Brody's the son of the great Sylvia Plachy, photographer, artist, left-winger and radical. Comedian George Lopez also turns up. He essentially plays a supervisor of janitors, a monstrous spawn of capitalism and Latino machismo who protects his position by ruthlessly enacting the will of the bosses, cultural and familial ties be damned. And then there's veteran actress Elpidia Carrillo, who plays a burnt-out Mexican woman who betrays the unions. A volcanic last act revelation, in which she spells out for her righteously indignant little sister why she did what she did, is particularly mind blowing. Here the actress summons a powerful blend of tear-inducing pain and fury. Her revelation hammers home the point of the film, the point of many of Loach's films, and a point which Bertolt Brecht famously laid out almost a century ago in "The Threepenny Opera": "First comes food, then comes morality". Brecht's statement encapsulates a range of human behaviours, primarily two which operate as a sort of double-helix or feedback loop; man ignores immorality because he fears of losing what he has, and man ignores morality when he has nothing. Somewhat unique for this "type" of film, Loach's immigrants are not portrayed as some ubiquitous, exotic mass, but full characters with diverging, very individual views, some indifferent, some self-centred, some politically informed (and indifferent or self-centred for diametrically opposed reasons) and some engaged in political activity back in Mexico. They are not naive pawns led by Brody, who in another director's hands may have developed into a white saviour. Brody's gang are real, savvy, and have their own deeply embedded (and often conflicting) modes of survival. For all its cathartic fury, for all its nods to 1920s Soviet Cinema, with its marching militants, placard pumping, Eisensteinian ideals and collective heroes, Loach's last act is ultimately pessimistic. Our heroes are shipped back to Mexico and we're suspicious of even what little has been won. Loach, like John Sayles, is too much of a small thinker to navigate his way out of the problems his films deal with. And while his brand of cinema is necessary, there is a feeling that, as Theodor Adorno once showed, though art represents a resistance to the violence of conformist thinking, non-conformity itself wasted away long ago, became insipid, became consumer goods. Art can no longer be a refuge for truth, Adorno believed, in the long term it will merely represent a flight into illusion, even if it does have a dialectic force. Still, Loach at least encourages some engagement with a prevalent form of cultural metapathy, which is not just traditional "apathy", but a pathological indifference, in which all manners of misconduct (from stolen elections to "benign" policies which actively court illegal immigrants) can happen without the batting of an eyelid.8.5/10 – Worth one viewing. Makes a good companion-piece to "Salt of the Earth" and "My Name is Joe".

"Bread and Roses" was less agitprop than I expected, though I just tuned out on the more didactic speeches (so maybe I missed how the Pyrrhic labor victory was actually negotiated). More docudrama in feel, per director Ken Loach's improv style, than "Norma Rae," the movie is made poignant by the two counter-pointing women leads. As sisters both trying to improve their lot in life, from brutal immigration to the search for respectability and a modicum of comfort through hard work, the actress's chemical reaction of their relationship keeps the movie real. The romantic side story is thankfully just a blip, as it doesn't work that well.While I got a kick out of the cameo appearances of Hollywood SAG-member actors at their lawyers' party while the lawyers are accused of owning the buildings that employ the chintzy janitors' contractors, a little more on that legal side would have made the contractors' less stereotypically evil. I was reminded of a conversation I had with my grandfather, who lived to be over 100, when he overheard some trial being called "The Trial of the Century" -- he launched on in detail about how the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory had gotten off thanks to the silver tongues of their lawyers, whose names were etched in his memory.The laudatory gimmick of providing bi-lingual sub-titles as the characters slip between English and Spanish is lost when (once again!) the subtitles are white on white -- what, does yellow cost that much more? Maybe movie patrons need to organize!(originally written 6/3/2001)

Ken Loach has made outstanding, impassioned films about the British working class for decades, but some of his more recent material has felt a bit lacking in variety. His decision to make a film set in Los Angeles was undoubtedly a good one, especially as, in 'Bread and Roses', he tells of a side to that city (its immigrant underclass) usually unrepresented by the Hollywood moguls. What's best about this film is the realistic insight it provides into the lives of its characters, and knowing that it is based on a true story only increases one's interest in how it will turn out, and one's political anger at the gross injustices in our societies. The two-faced attitudes that affluent countries have towards migrant labour are also directly exposed. What's slightly less strong is the film's narrative arc (judged purely as fiction); everything ends quite suddenly, and, surprisingly for a work by Loach, optimistically as well. Nonetheless, Loach has seen things that many who live in L.A. chose to overlook; and the film constitutes a distinctive entry in his distinguished canon.

This film gets less attention than it should because it's so explicitly political. That's one of its strengths, but if you think it will bother you, see it for the great story and the wonderful acting. Bread and Roses is one of the most intensely realistic films I've ever seen, but at the same time it's one of the most dramatic, and also one of the most moving. If you can watch the confrontation between Rosa and Maya, or the last few scenes of the movie, without crying, you need to check your pulse.