"Kenneth Loach, the English director (Kes, The Gamekeeper), is not a fashionable filmmaker at the moment, but he is an exceedingly good one whose movies may one day provide a more accurate record of a nation's collective unconscious than the work of any other single director. It might seem odd to refer to the collective unconscious in the films of a director who, working in a semidocumentary style, resolutely refuses introspection, or to take the long view, and whose inarticulate characters mean exactly what they are trying to say. He regards everything at eye level...but his shots are so intelligently framed, and in such sharp focus, that we are always as acutely aware of the physical features of the landscape as those of the people who inhabit them. Such a film is Looks and Smiles, a grim but not especially sad or melodramatic tale about three young people growing up today in Sheffield, England" (Vincent Canby, New York Times). Alan gives up looking for a job, joins the army and is sent off to Northern Ireland; Karen and Mick are in love, but her problems with her divorced parents continually take the fore; Mick seems doomed to be perpetually unemployed. "Simply told and beautifully acted, this is a deeply moving film about the economic and emotional problems of adolescents" (New York Film Festival '81).