KES — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

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Based on schoolteacher Barry Hines's 1968 novel "A Kestrel for a Knave," Ken Loach's 1969 verité film, marked the filmmaker's departure from the BBC television system where he learned his craft.

With BBC producer Tony Garnett, Loach had won kudos for his social realist films about such sensitive issues as abortion ("Up the Junction" - 1965) and homelessness ("Cathy Come Home" - 1966).

For "Kes," Loach and Garnett created their own production company and cast a young amateur actor named David Bradley to play the story's oppressed 13-year-old protagonist Billy Casper. Bradleys sensitive portrayal of the vulnerable child is the heart of the film.

In the working class town of Barnsley, Billy has been in trouble with the law and is still paying off his fines — a predicament that limits his options after secondary school. Billy lives in a tiny ramshackle house with his emotionally remote mother and physically abusive half-brother Jud, with whom Billy shares a small bed.

At school Billy is mistreated by his teachers. His marginal behavior does little to dispel their opinion of him as a "hopeless case" whose future lies in the area's coal mines. But Billy's personal outlook brightens when he discovers a kestrel nest and teaches himself, with a book he steals from a secondhand bookstore, to care for and train the bird that he steals from its fragile home.

With the help of gifted cinematographer Chris Menges, Ken Loach creates an incredibly powerful film that purposefully examines the dire social conditions of a system that threatens to squeeze out all the individuality of its youth. "Kes" is an essential document of '60s British culture that comes from a deeply personal place yet resonates across all cultures.   

Rated PG-13. 110 mins. 

PIXOTE — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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Long before Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund made "City of God" in 2002, about Rio de Janeiro's youth-centric atmosphere of organized crime, director Hector Babenco set the bar for such explosive cinema with his brilliant 1981 film "Pixote."

The film's full title, "Pixote: a Lei do Mais Fraco" translates as "Pixote: The Law of the Weakest," and was based on José Louzeiro's book "A infância dos mortos" ("The Childhood of the Dead Ones") in a screenplay adaptation by Babenco and his script collaborator Jorge Duran, about a young boy named Pixote (pronounced Pee-jo-che).

Fernando Ramos Da Silva was the expressive young non-actor chosen to play his life as a ghetto child for Babenco's evocative subjective camera. The boy is sent to a cruel juvenile reformatory where he sniffs glue and learns the ways of prison survival that inform his life after he and two of his friends escape the jail. Pixote desperately seeks the attention a mother figure even as he falls deeper into an inevitable vortex of crime and violence.

"Pixote" is Hector Babenco's masterwork. The film is a distressed and powerful cry for social change in a Brazilian society that feeds on its on children. It is a deeply affecting and haunting film that penetrates the skin of its viewer through the personal commitment to its subject that comes through in every frame.

That Fernandos Ramos Da Silva was eventually murdered at the age of 19 by police in Sao Paulo only emphasizes the sad fate of so many more Brazilian children just like him. "Pixote" is an amazing cinematic social document made with fury and passion by an uncompromising director.

There has never been another film that approaches its depiction of Brazil's condemned youth, not even "City of God."

Rated R. 128 mins. 

SECRETS & LIES — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

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After years of working in British television, and making four impressive features that included "Bleak Moments" (1971) and "Naked" (1993), Mike Leigh firmly established himself internationally as Britain's version of John Cassavetes.

"Secrets and Lies" is a revealing familial drama of untold emotional depth, social import, and narrative complexity. Few films have ever achieved such precise sharp satire as Leigh's beautiful effort. 

Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Hortense Cumberbatch, a twenty-something black optometrist living in London. Familial storm clouds brew when Hortense traces her family tree after the death of her adoptive mother.

The biological trail leads reveals that Hortense's mother is a working class white woman named Cynthia Purley (Brenda Blethyn).

Leigh spent many months of preparation with his actors doing improvisation workshops in order to create a script that carries a super-natural sense of realism and elemental truth.

Its centerpiece is an unbroken 8-minute shot of Hortense and Cynthia meeting in an empty restaurant for tea where walls of defenses gradually come crumbling down as the truth of their relationship is revealed.

Every performance from Leigh's brilliant ensemble of actors, that include Timothy Spall and Phyllis Logan, is a thing of rare dramatic authenticity. Blethyn and Jean-Baptiste are extraordinary in their restraint, humor, and spontaneity. The film's also-unbroken climatic social scene elevates its primordial familial fabric into an ethereal tapestry of emotions and motivations where every ancient thread of untruth is pulled out along with other lies that have attached themselves over the years.

Much more than just a touching story of the ties that bind humanity and the ways we divulge our true identities, "Secrets & Lies" (1996) is a staggering work of cinematic genius.

It is truly a perfect film.

Rated R. 136 mins.