BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Ken Loach.

DESPITE his films being of quite eclectic subject matter, Ken Loach is primarily known for his kitchen-sink, social realism. He made his name with the controversial 60s TV movie Cathy Come Home, and since then has shown an empathy and understanding of everyday people’s struggles. His politics aren’t hard to decipher, and while the politics in The Navigators are obvious, the film’s success comes his almost exclusive focus on his protagonists and their increasing desperation with the way times have changed.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: good cop, bad cop.

Infernal Affairs will forever suffer comparisons to its Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning remake The Departed. Scorsese’s film was bloated, weighed down by its star power, and revelled in the moral ambiguity of the premise. Infernal Affairs in contrast is buffed down to a sheen, the moral ambiguity of the narrative a thin (but important) film around its seeming glossy fashion shoot. But that doesn’t make Infernal Affairs a bad film. Anything but – it’s one of the most enjoyable action films of the last decade. The narrative is so tightly coiled, the tension arises simply from waiting for the script’s muscles to flex.

ALEXANDER BISLEY reports from the Wellington Film Society. Coming up: Sembene’s swansong.

Moolaade was the last film from Ousmane Sembene, the Senegalese father of African cinema. The rebel with a cause went out in style. Expelled from a conservative school, Sembene forged a saw-toothed, egalitarian consciousness as an immigrant Marseille dockworker. He damn near perfected art as politics with Moolaade, a rousing film that recommends itself also on purely aesthetic grounds.