Word: damien
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...violence are no less bloody than the atrocities visited on them. There's nearly always a tendency in movies about revolutions to glamorize and ennoble the oppressed but that's not the purport of this film. We get to know the revolutionaries - there's a sweetly tentative romance between Damien and a woman named Sinead (Orla Fitzgerald) that is the more touching because it so gently stated - and we like them in part because they are reluctant warriors, particularly when they must dispense with their own countrymen, who lack their righteous fervor. Yet we also cannot escape the feeling that...
...largely undisciplined soldiers recruited from the demobilized English army and functioning in Ireland as terrorist-enforcers of the status quo. Loach's film, written by Paul Laverty, focuses on a Sinn Fein (or revolutionist) "flying column" operating in County Cork, with special emphasis on a gentle young doctor, Damien (Cillian Murphy) and his more hot-headed brother, Teddy (Padraic Delaney), who is the group's leader. Theirs is a life of midnight raids on British barracks, roadside ambushes, betrayals, captivity (which includes brutal torture) and the meting out of summary justice to informers, all of which Loach captures with potent...
...wins an ambiguous victory - a treaty providing dominion status within the British Empire, a measure of self-rule but not full independence. Part of the IRA goes back to war; Damien, rather surprisingly among them, but with Teddy, even more surprisingly, donning the uniform of the Free State. If you guess, at this point, that the film is heading for a brother-against-brother tragedy, you would not be wrong...
...film is set in Ireland in 1920, when the locals fight for their independence from Britain, then split into rival factions. Two brothers personify the division: Teddy (Padraic Delaney), who's open to political compromise, and Damien (Cillian Murphy), who won't renounce the purity of his socialist ideals and joins the revolutionary arm of the i.r.a. Loach's approach, though, is anything but evenhanded. The British soldiers are cartoonishly brutal, insulting old ladies, bayoneting men, pulling out a suspect's fingernails with rusty pliers. It's easy to see which of the brothers is to have your sympathy. Murphy...
...incredibly wan and uninspired drama chronicling the Irish Civil War of the 1920s. Although the Cannes jury embraced the film, the latest offering from the veteran British award-winning filmmaker falls far below expectations. Named after a 19th century Irish folk song, “Barley” follows Damien (Cillian Murphy of “28 Days Later,” “Red Eye,” and “Batman Begins”) as he attempts to suppress the abusive English Black and Tans alongside the Irish Republican Army (IRA). After a long and plodding...