We Want Sex Equality

Made in Dagenham hit the screen and shows that a not-exceedingly-mega- budget film can be the best of the year.

The factually based story of how the Dagenham women brought Ford to a standstill makes for surprising film material.But it works .The film is authentic to the late 60s down to the tea cups and kitchen cabinets , the clothes and make up.

Miranda Richardson as Barbara Castle steals the film,Bob Hoskins,Geraldine James are all excellent in their roles.

Stay in for the credits though, that part of it had me reaching for the tissues .

This is a film which will have you shaking with anger one minute and crying the next.Highly recommended.

Made in Dagenham has brilliantly broken the mould. It combines the clear, explicit and nuanced politics of the best of Ken Loach with the heart-grabbing attractions of any mainstream popular film you care to name. The brilliant scene where Sally Hawkin's modest and unpractised union rep spells out why the job she does is skilled is a metaphor for the whole movie. Politics isn't hard to understand – it's our lives, stupid! I cannot think of a previous British film with a mainstream aesthetic that has had the guts before to put the ordinary workers' point of view so wholeheartedly at its centre. But this is no simplistic idealised narrative. Going on strike, as the women find, makes you very unpopular, not least with the very people you'd thought would support you – the Union leadership and your fellow (male) workers. Nothing is a cinch, nothing too easily won and Sally Hawkins brilliantly portrays the thorny predicament of the figurehead of the struggle beginning to doubt her own single-mindedness and how much it's costing not just her family but the entire town (and possibly the UK's) working community. Made in Dagenham shows a true story in a truthful, thoroughly engaging way. There is not one bum note in any of the performances – from Kenneth Cranham's sleazily compromised Union official, to Rosamund Pike's surprisingly moving posh wife, to Jamie Winstone's wannabe model – everybody has a committed credibility without ever being worthy or cloying and Sally Hawkins (with a startling look of the young Rita Tushingham) plays a richly layered blinder in the central role. Huge hats off to the writer Billy Ivory who has written a bright, funny, completely unpatronising and clever script. And a big, big thank you to producers Stephen Woolley and Elizabeth Karlsen for the guts to get right inside the truth of this big, big story that started in a little place.

The movie gets to convey the atmosphere of those months in 1968, where 187 women joined together and went on a strike to ask for equal salaries to men, and better conditions of work. We as viewers really feel the cohesion, the solidarity, as well as the tensions of this group. Never pedantic, or too dramatically committed, the movie gets to make the public, mainly the female one, reflect upon the hard struggle women had to face before getting some basic rights, when still actual and necessary is the reflection about today's condition of female workers, when some kind of discrimination is still to be faced. However, the movie proceeds with a soft and entertaining pace, maybe at some points too entertaining, the sparkling character of Rita O'Grady herself was invented in order to make the story more cinematographically involving. No doubt however the cast makes a difference, the actresses offer single heart-felt interpretations, in the same way as the choral shots show intensity and strong emotion.

After a summer of endless animations and shlock-horror here - at last! - is a film with real heart.

Sally Hawkins is a revelation as Rita who becomes the striking machinists' spokeswoman; her speeches to co-workers, union chiefs, management and the press all start out tremulous and gain in confidence as she hits her stride. Geraldine James who usually plays upper-class ladies (I'm still trying to forgive and forget her breast-feeding David Walliams in Little Britain!) here plays a kind of 'upper-working-class' woman with a husband still shell-shocked from WW2. John Sessions does a Spitting Image turn as Harold Wilson, and Miranda Richardson morphs her Blackadder Elizabeth I into a fiery Barbara Castle (dressed by C&A).

In my Gap Year (date withheld) I worked in a Sussex factory that had a sewing-room. The movie gets the atmosphere exactly right but I don't think working women were quite as free with the f-word back then as they are in this script. The end credits run against pictures of the original Dagenham strikers who all look like clones of Corrie's Ena Sharples and Florrie Linley. Some of the film machinists are more Carnaby Street than Coronation Street, but that's OK. These girls make you laugh, they occasionally bring a lump to your throat, but most of all they make you want to cheer.

A small slice of 1960s history, this film packs a big punch. Do not miss it.

I am disappointed to read some of the negative vibes about this film. I saw a screening at Vintage Goodwood yesterday and the enjoyment of the audience was overwhelming complete with outbreaks of applause. Some really excellent cinematography especially the extreme close-up of Sally Hawkins in one of her most desperate moments provided a very authentic backdrop to a really believable time-piece movie. Bob Hoskins, Rosamund Pike and Sally Hawkins excel. I came out of the cinema having been educated, entertained and emotionally touched. I wonder just how many of the negative reviews have been written by men who of course may just be feeling rather embarrassed by the roles of their historical alter-egos.