LOOKING FOR ERIC .World Cinema

Working-class hero Ken Loach makes o surprising shift to a light, even fanciful mood in his new film about Eric a bedraggled postal worker (the winning Steve Evets) who is watching his entire life slip away from him. The realist, street-level setting and Eric’s messy domestic world is absolutely Loachian, but for this serious and politically committed director, there’s something joyously new here. Eric, at the end of his rope with a wife who no longer seems to love him and a pair of stepsons who have no time for him, begins imagining that he’s visited by Manchester United soccer star Eric Cantona (playing himself), and poof Cantona appears, providing Eric with just the kind of frank, colorful guidance that he needs to turn his life around. Loach tops into his inner Frank Capra, and serves up a hero for our recessionary times.