...in watching “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” his new film (which won the top prize at Cannes last year), it is possible to appreciate both Mr. Loach’s passion and his sense of nuance. Set in Ireland in the 1920s, the film paints history in stark colors and observes as they blur and bleed. Mr. Loach and Paul Laverty, the gifted screenwriter with whom he regularly collaborates, leave no doubt as to who the villains are in this tale.

From the start, when they raid an Irish farm, the British irregulars known as the Black and Tans are as brutal and sadistic as Hollywood Nazis. The atrocities they commit have an immediate radicalizing effect on the film’s hero, Damien (Cillian Murphy), who abandons his plans to study medicine in London to join the armed uprising against the British.

Injustice, in Mr. Loach’s world, tends to be a simple matter. It resides in the unprincipled, dehumanizing exercise of power — whether wielded by capital, the state, or an army of occupation — against those who have none. The complications arise, and the arguments start, when the powerless try to fight back.

Brutal as “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” is in depicting British acts of violence, it does not flinch from showing the harsh, sometimes heartless tactics of the Irish Republican Army flying columns. Among the most painful scenes are the executions of an informer and later a landlord, killings that foreshadow a turn from insurrection to civil war.

Radical though he is, Mr. Loach is hardly a romantic, and the deep humanism that informs his best work — a category in which “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” surely belongs — is insulated from sentimentality by the sense that history is a long, bruising fight, a chronicle of compromise and defeat as well as of tentative triumph and provisional hope. He is also, as anyone steeped in the history of the modern left must be, acquainted with the factionalism and disunity that bedevils those who see themselves on the side of the angels.

Excerpt from A. O. Scott's review at the NY Times located HERE

Fox (UK)

The week of September 3rd (actually one day prior to the IFC DVD release) a UK company (region 2- PAL) called Sixteen Films will release:

 The Ken Loach Collection Volume 1 (8-disc - Kes, The Gamekeeper, Riff Raff, Raining Stones, Ladybird Ladybird, The Navigators, Bread and Roses and Poor Cow) R2 UK Sixteen Films

The Ken Loach Collection Volume 2 (8-disc - Cathy Come Home, My Name is Joe, Sweet Sixteen, Ae, Fond Kiss, Land and Freedom, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Hidden Agenda and Carla’s Song) R2 UK Sixteen Films

(click covers for link)

1:1.78 Original Aspect Ratio

Aspect Ratio:
Widescreen anamorphic - 1:1.78

Edition Details:
• Disc 1:
• Commentary by director Ken Loach and historical advisor Prof. Donal O'Driscoll
• Disc 2:
• Featurette: Carry On Ken: A Look At the Work of Ken Loach (46:56)
• Theatrical Trailer (1:55)
• Photo gallery

DVD Release Date: 6 Nov 2006
Double keep-case