Dark Lies the Island

Bloody Sunday

2002 · ★ 7.2

The dramatised story of the Irish civil rights protest march on January 30 1972 which ended in a massacre by British troops.

Hear My Song

1991 · ★ 5.9

Singer Josef Locke fled to Ireland 25 years ago to escape the clutches of the tax man and police Chief Jim Abbott. What he also left behind was the love of his life Cathleen Doyle. Now, Micky O’Neill is desperate to save both his ailing Liverpool nightclub ‘Heartly’s’ and his failing relationship with the beautiful Nancy, Cathleen’s daughter. The solution? Book the infamous Josef Locke.

The Country Girls

1983 · ★ 7

The lifelong friendship of two rural Irish girls is put on the test when they grow up and leave for the big city, each with different life goals in mind.

Love & Rage

2000 · ★ 4.8

Agnes MacDonnell, a strong and self-confident Englishwoman, owns a large estate on an island off the west coast of Ireland. When she begins a passionate but dangerous affair with her new estate manager, Agnes wages a desperate struggle to dominate this charismatic but destructive man.

O'Donoghue's Opera

1998

In this mock opera infused with gallows humour, Ronnie Drew and his band of bohemian merrymakers, The Dubliners, re-enact the execution ballad ‘The Night Before Larry Was Stretched’. Larry finds himself caught in a hangman’s noose as just reward for being ‘the best burglar in all Ireland’. Made in 1965, the film remained uncompleted and unseen until its restoration in 1998.

Cal

1984 · ★ 5.8

Cal, a young man on the fringes of the IRA, falls in love with Marcella, a Catholic woman whose husband, a Protestant policeman, was killed one year earlier by the IRA.

The Playboys

1992 · ★ 6.2

A young woman, Tara Maguire (Robin Wright) scandalizes her provincial Irish village in the 1950s by having a baby out of a wedlock, and refusing to name the father. She has a rare beauty and every man in town desires her, especially Sergeant Hegarty (Albert Finney). The arrival of a dramatic troupe stirs things up even more, especially when she falls in love with one f the "Playboys", Tom Casey (Aidan Quinn).

Bender

In post-punk late-’70s Dublin, a gang of teenage misfits gets caught up in the chaos of an impending papal visit. Egged on by a gruff American record-store owner, they become convinced that the massive open-air Mass is their last, best chance to lose their virginity before graduation.

Laws of Attraction

2004 · ★ 5.8

Amidst a sea of litigation, two New York City divorce lawyers find love.

Outside of Paradise

1938 · ★ 7

Daniel Francis O'Toole, singing maestro in a New York restaurant, finds himself the unexpected heir to an estate in Ireland. He doesn't have money enough for the passage to Ireland, but the band members decide to incorporate him, advancing him the fare for equal shares in the estate. In Ireland, Danny finds that his is only a half-share, and the other half belongs to Mavourneen Kerrigan and she has the exclusive right to sell or keep the property...which, despite his pleas, she refuses to do. She also declares him an undesired guest, objects to his presence and insists that he prepare his own meals. He does so in a large main hall, but can only make hamburgers.

Angela's Ashes

1999 · ★ 7.3

An Irish Catholic family returns to 1930s Limerick after a child's death in America. The unemployed I.R.A. veteran father struggles with poverty, prejudice, and alcoholism as the family endures harsh slum conditions.

The Commitments

1991 · ★ 7.3

Jimmy Rabbitte, just a thick-ya out of school, gets a brilliant idea: to put a soul band together in Barrytown, his slum home in north Dublin. First he needs musicians and singers: things slowly start to click when he finds three fine-voiced females virtually in his back yard, a lead singer (Deco) at a wedding, and, responding to his ad, an aging trumpet player, Joey "The Lips" Fagan.