RAINING STONES (Directed by Ken Loach. Starring Bruce Jones, Julie Brown, Gemma Phoenix, Ricky Tomlinson)

LOACH HAS been a cinematic chronicler of the British working class since the sixties, sometimes a lonely figure clinging to the values of the kitchen sink drama while all about him have been making tea for the American market.

Raining Stones is another harsh but humorous tale of resilience under fire, of just how hard the struggle for daily bread can be. Oddly for an avowed Marxist, it centres on a Catholic family and, in its subtly religious imagery and its unexpectedly up-beat conclusion, apparently finds solace and not opiates in religion.

It opens with a hilarious sacrifice: two unemployed, middle-aged men kidnap a sheep but can’t quite bring themselves to slaughter it, taking it to their local butcher instead. It is the first of a series of misplaced survival plans, with Bob (Bruce Jones) determined to raise the £200 to buy his daughter a communion dress. In the warm but barren landscape of his working class estate, the dress becomes his holy grail. Bob determines to go to almost any lengths to get it, until, with the intrusion of loan sharks in his life, events spiral horrifically out of control.

Loach never shies from (or tires of) showing us how grim it really is up North, but this time round he allows himself a touch of almost miraculous redemption. Yet there is no epiphany. The cinematic style is, as ever, straightforward ciné verité, and the miracle rooted in the everyday. Raining Stones is not so much a celebration or even a confirmation of religious faith, as a recognition when you’ve got nothing else, sometimes faith is all that keeps you going.

The often mundane, but recognisably real and blackly, pitilessly funny world of Loach conjures up is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it sure beats the hell out of the kind Merchant Ivory keep serving up in china cups.