4/5 Vintage Loach!
  by Ping Lim (Christchurch)
Ken Loach's movie is always gritty, truthful, relevant, and very human. This movie is marketed as a modern version of Romeo & Juliet but it's broader than that. Instead of rivalry between families, it touches upon religion, race, generation gap, and choices we make in lives. Instead of projecting the whites having prejudice against the others, this movie shows that racism could come from the others too. It comes to the point when people have to decide whether to follow their own hearts or to live the life the family sees fit so as to keep the harmony. This movie touches on family honour (which is featured in the news lately where Pakistani family members killed one of their own so as to uphold the honour of the family just because she was alleged to be seeing a white person). This brings to the point that are we to be regarded differently just because of the colour of our skin even though we were born in the country that we are staying in now? For myself, just because I'm a Chinese, I was yelled at by racists to go home when home is where I am now. No extra features here and highly recommended.

5/5 Romance vs reality . . .
  by Ronald Scheer (Los Angeles)
Leave it to Ken Loach to illuminate the real-world complications in a romantic story about star-crossed lovers. The romance is surely there in the magnetic presence of its two lovers, Roisin (Eva Birthistle) and Casim (Atta Yaqub). She's the young Irish music teacher and he's the only son of a tightly knit Pakistani family, all of them living in Glasgow. The social and cultural forces bent on keeping the two lovers apart are formidable and merciless, and the relationship falters and founders sometimes under their crushing weight.

For a long time it is only Casim who feels the brunt of it, his family having already arranged a marriage for him with a cousin and busily begun an addition onto their house for the newlyweds. Then there are problems for Roisin, whose employment at a Catholic school becomes jeopardized by her relationship with Casim. Rarely do two characters in film have to risk and finally sacrifice so much for true love. While not giving away the ending, it can be said that it's in keeping with the rest of the film's clear-eyed examination of the tug-of-war between romance and reality.

5/5 Ken Loach as a director is little known in USA,
  by Mr. Ian George Fraser (Brazil)
partly because for many years he was virtually blacklisted as a Trotskyite and political subversive, on account of his gritty 60s and 70s social dramas. The plot of this film ( which with a lesser director would have been straight Romeo and Juliet) has been fairly well rehearsed by previous reviewers so I'll skip, if I may quickly to appraisal.
I know of no other director who can take an "ordinary" theme, in this case love across the racial/ religious divide and have you on the edge of your seat till the last take as to how it will turn out. And believe you me it could very easily have been different. The way Loach does this is never to belittle or underestimate the forces opposed to the "liberal" conclusion that he draws. His depiction of traditional Moslem and Catholic values is both fair and accurate. He never demonises. I think that is what has made so many traditionalists over the years fume so much. If you haven't seen this film yet, see it. It's much better than Shakespeare. What a tragedy for 15 years he was virtually not allowed to work.

5/5 I DON'T UNDERSTAND YOU !
  by wdanthemanw (Geneva, Switzerland)
Acclaimed British director Ken Loach, the director of Family Life, Kes and Land and Freedom DVD, shot FOND KISS..., AE in 2003. The film earned a few awards in European film festivals but, until now, it hasn't been theatrically released in the U.S.A.

This movie is about the difficulties undergone by Roisin Hanlon, an Irish music teacher working in a catholic school in Glasgow, Scotland, and Casim Khan, a Pakistani young man of the second generation, in order to have a regular love affair in the social and familial environment they live in. Ken Loach and the script writer Paul Laverty, in order to give more weight to their demonstration, chose to describe the main characters as if they were living symbols of their social background. Hence Roisin is of course Caucasian but also a blond girl who seems to have just landed from Scandinavia. She doesn't have any family left and has just left her husband. On the contrary, Kasim lives with his family, is on the verge of marrying a cousin from Pakistan he hasn't met yet, and is unconsciously impregnated by the religious and social environment of the British Pakistani community.

At the end of the film, the solution advocated by the director is the separation, not the separation of the couple but the separation between Kasim and his untolerant family. Such a behavior seems to work in the movie but I really don't know if it would work in our everyday life.

A DVD zone your library.

4/5 Simple, straight-forward tale about society & culture
  by Noirceuil le Sombre (Stanwood, WA United States)
I really enjoyed this movie when I rented it from the local blockbuster. I liked it so much, I bought it! I even nagged my GF to see it too, I felt so strongly about its worth as an illuminating look into the struggles individuals go through when culture and religion come between two people who simply want to explore their mutual feelings for each other. It's a worthwhile tale and you should see it.