John Fraser In all my life, I never imagined a film's highlight could be a song by the Proclaimers of all people, a band I hate.This film is the most boring, clichéd, unlikeable film I have ever seen. To begin with, the characters are all unpleasant, without exception. Only the main protagonist is more than one dimensional, but is a violent thug who has had a Damascene conversion because he becomes a father and completely unsympathetic. The rest of the characters are little more than circus clowns and rather poor ones at that. There is plenty of violence, swearing and Irn bru, but little in the way of plot, engaging characters or narrative arc.I can't believe this film was made and has made me revise my opinion of Ken Loach. Absolutely awful!

TxMike This movie was filmed in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and the Scottish Highlands, all places my son and I visited by train about 20 years ago. For me that was a highlight of watching this, to see those places again.I found it on Netflix streaming movies.It is Robbie's story. Having grown up in a rough part of Glasgow he has already in his young age had a series of bad encounters with the law. He is a hot-head too, and when disrespected can easily go off to almost killing the victim. Now he has also gotten his girlfriend Leonie pregnant, much to the dissatisfaction of her dad, who even tries to bribe him with money to leave and never see his daughter again. Robbie doesn't have very good prospects.Robbie's life begins to change when get gets on a work payback group for non capital offenders, basically being a supervised work crew to pay back society for their crimes. The monitor of the group, and the man with the van, gets them interested in Scotch Whiskey, and the title of this movie arises from a distillery tour when the young guide explains that in barrel aging a small percentage of the whiskey is lost forever through evaporation and they call that "the angel's share." (NB - The Jim Beam company calls the whiskey trapped inside the wood at the end of aging, "the devil's share", and even sell a whiskey of that name where they claim to have extracted it from the wood. I have some and it in fact is pretty good.) Anyway it turns out Robbie has a natural nose for discerning different qualities of whiskey, and I naturally thought that would lead him into getting a job with a distillery and be able to leave his former life, and build something better for Leonie and him. But the movie takes a quite different turn. Good movie, I enjoyed it for the characters and the subject, both redemption and imagining being there in the whiskey tastings.SPOILERS: Robbie finds out a very rare, very old whiskey is to be sold at auction, and in fact one bottle ended up going for over One Million pounds. But before the auction Robbie hatched a plan with his friends on the work gang, they visited the distillery, Robbie managed to hide among the casks through the night, his friends were outside with empty one- liter soda bottles, he opened the valuable cask and used long clear tubing to siphon off enough to fill 4 bottles. Then he took ordinary whiskey to back fill so that the 4 liters would not be missed. Even when cops stopped and searched them randomly afterwards, all the cops saw were 4 bottles of what they thought was soda. Robbie learned of a black market buyer and sold a bottle for 200,000 pounds and split it with the other 3, and bargained for a job for himself in the whiskey business. His hapless friends broke two of the bottles in a moment of stupidity, and he gave the 4th to the work supervisor who had introduced him to whiskey. But Robbie, Leonie, and their new baby were off to a new life near Stirling.(NB- About 20 years ago we spent two nights in a hotel in Stirling which I like to describe as "the worst hotel in all of Scotland." It was their last weekend of operation, I suspect it was being demolished afterwards. The only good part was that they let us stay free, that's how close to "camping" it was. But I will always remember that hotel stay.)

l_rawjalaurence Set in contemporary Glasgow, THE ANGELS' SHARE does not shy away from portraying the squalid reality of many young peoples' lives. Robbie (Paul Brannigan) has to complete long hours of community service, together with his friends Rhino (William Ruane), Albert (Gary Maitland) and Mo (Jasmin Riggins), while having to cope with the perpetual threat of attack from long-time adversary Clancy (Scott Kyle). However Robbie's 'minder' Harry (John Henshaw), who supervises him on his community service, introduces Robbie to the intricacies of scotch whisky, and Robbie's life is transformed as a result. In an attempt to improve his life, he becomes involved in an elaborate plot to steal an exceptionally rare brand of Scotch from a Highland distillery. While Paul Laverty's screenplay does not shy away from the seamier sides of Glasgow life, it nonetheless suggests that people can be redeemed, so long as they are provided with moral as well as emotional support. Harry seems an unlikely figure in this respect, but his basic honesty stands out in a film full of shady characters. The four youngsters (Robbie and his friends) are totally convincing in their roles - so much so that we share their pleasure when their scheme eventually succeeds and they can look forward to a better life, however transient that might be.

Yoann Achir This is the first Ken Loach directed movie I have ever seen and I love it ! Rumour has it that it's not his best one; if that's true, I can't wait to see the others !! It is a great mix between comedy and drama, a bitter sweet comedy as they call it. The problem is that if you had asked me if I felt like watching a movie by an old English director I had never heard of, at the Sémaphore, well… I'd have answered very, very negatively. It seems to me that this movie is misclassified in the complicated/"grown-up" movies section because of Ken Loach's former movies and his political implication. As a matter of fact, watching the trailer was enough to convince me that I could enjoy it in spite of my preconceived ideas. (Albert's particularly funny, "Mona who ?!" ; "You're not gonna be sleeping again officer").About the movie itself, I think the actors are so talented and the dialogue is so efficient and real that it looks like a documentary ! The Scottish accent sounds really funny and authentic but sometimes I actually wonder if they meant to say something or if they were just making strange noises !!! The music is well chosen and I really like it; I remember hearing Homebird by Foy Vance and I'm Gonna Be (500 miles) by The Proclaimers. I can't say much more about it because a part of the audience obviously wasn't interested in watching the movie and therefore got really noisy and annoying short after its beginning which luckily didn't prevent me from having a great time :) .