I, Daniel Blake

Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2016 (Loach's second, twelve years after The Wind That Shakes the Barley) and the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film. Loach was 80 when he made it; this was supposed to have been his final film, before Sorry We Missed You and The Old Oak followed. The screenplay, by long-time collaborator Paul Laverty, is the angriest the pair had produced since the early 1990s.

Daniel Blake (the stand-up comedian Dave Johns, in his first major film role) is a Newcastle joiner recovering from a heart attack. His doctor has signed him off work; the Department for Work and Pensions, applying its automated work-capability assessment, declares him fit and cuts off his Employment and Support Allowance. The film follows his Kafkaesque attempt to navigate Universal Credit bureaucracy alongside Katie (Hayley Squires), a young single mother sanctioned to a foodbank. The foodbank scene with Squires is one of the most quietly devastating sequences in any Loach film.

The film became politically consequential beyond its cinema run. The phrase I, Daniel Blake entered British political discourse; the SNP, Labour and Liberal Democrats all referenced it in parliamentary debates on welfare reform. Conservative ministers attacked it. Few works of British cinema have so directly intervened in their own moment.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most consequential British film of the 2010s, proof that social-realist cinema can still produce work that policy-makers cannot ignore. Loach's career-defining late masterpiece, and a furious gift to anyone who has ever sat in a Jobcentre.