The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Ken Loach is one of these British directors which really is able to take the pulse on the British society, or the modern Europe of today, if you like. Loach go right to the core of the modern slave market. a society which is not able to take care of the citizens, either they are legally in the country or not.When single mum Angie loses her job as recruiter for a shady firm operating in Poland, she decides to start a recruitment firm of her own together with her friend Rose. They start off legally, but meeting desperate illegal immigrants changes this. She starts off providing fake passports and papers. While all this going on, her son struggles at school.Ken Loach is such a brilliant storyteller, that you immediately get suck into the story. So realistic it is almost scary. Loach let his person gallery be charming, blunt and real. with the swearing at all.Just see it!

There's a new exploited class in the Western world. The illegal immigrants. Since they've got no papers, they will take any work, any wage, any risks. And there are people who are just too eager to help them.The main person here is fired from a recruiting agency. She starts her own and also starts to exploit people like she's been exploited. The free world means almost slavery, since people without papers have no rights. But those who provide companies with such labour force can easily become the victims in this perverted order.Another Ken Loach movie which put the unpleasant questions. And gives the unpleasant answers.

That film has to be seen all over the world. It shows how in our globalized world the migration of people is perfectly organized and managed outside all legality with the accomplice-ship and cooperation of most governments or national services in the western countries concerned by these migrations. Here London, England. The volunteers (!?!) are essentially coming from the European Community (Poland) but also non members states from eastern Europe (Ukraine) and some countries going through a crisis like Iran and Iraq. The human beings are cattle as soon as they put their first toe in the system. They pay heftily for their passage first, just like the Jewish community had to pay for the passage of the Jews who were deported to Auschwitz. Then they will be exploited at two levels. First by the skyrocketing rents they pay for one fourth of a room or one fifth of a caravan. Second they will get some work every morning for the day and with no certitude of anything: no contract, no health insurance, no guaranteed payment of the miserable salary, no guaranteed schooling for the children. Everything is done outside any official declaration, evading taxes and all controls. And no serious service is doing anything to find out and bring things back in line. But the worst part is, though some men are behind this kind of slave market, the main flesh-eating character is a white woman, a false blonde, divorced with an 11 year old son abandoned to her own parents. She has a black associate who will finally drop out when the other trespasses beyond the narrow line between exploitation and slavery on one side and cattle- or even garbage-processing on the other. One day she will call immigration authorities to report a clandestine camp in order to get it emptied for her load of slaves that is arriving on the following morning. The black woman will be replaced and the whole forced-labor merry-go-round will start again and amplify its operation. The only advantage of being exploited by a woman is that young males will have to perform some personal service to the female slave-manager to get work on the following day. A film to be seen urgently. I was divinely surprised by the causticity of Ken Loach I was considering as slightly tamed before seeing this film. He can still bite, the old pit-bull.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

As a non-Brit it is amazing and certainly amusing to see all the British behave in such a distinct way, only common to the islanders and I do not mean any of that slur which this politicised film tries to mobilise against. For example, scenes in which family is involved, are beautiful characterisations of more or less typical working class households, or rather any British folks.However, this film as well portrays fair business, the downside of capitalistic societies, in which free market only stops at borders, where nationality defines status and not your labour. Refreshingly, no easy answers are offer, no left-leaning ideologies or right-wing polemics penetrate the film. Thus, it is able to scratch a picture of phenomena without solutions; hence, not very entertaining.Anyway, it is worthwhile to watch It's a Free World,only if it were for the insightful studies into human behaviour.Enjoy it.