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100A beautiful film, harrowing, tough and rife with grief.
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100Immediately has you in its thrall and doesn't let go -- a reminder of how powerful and moving cinema set in wartime can be when all the elements align.
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100Takes a chaotic moment in the long history of "the Troubles" and turns it into a keening, air-clearing epic.
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100It's unmistakably the work of aging cinema activist Loach, who wears his social-justice heart on his sleeve and pauses the story for lively debates among the characters, especially as Sinn Fein signs a treaty that many think betrays the cause.
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90The Wind That Shakes the Barley turns out to be a more complicated, more dramatically potent story than it appears at first. It's concerned at its core not with how bad the British were but with what the cost of dealing with them was for the Irish.
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90The history presented in The Wind That Shakes the Barley hardly feels like a closed book or a museum display. It is as alive and as troubling as anything on the evening news, though far more thoughtful and beautiful.
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90Loach hurls us into the fracas, circa 1920, and creates such a vivid sense of the nuts and bolts of guerilla war you almost forget you are watching a period piece. Unlike the epic sweep of Neil Jordan's "Billy Collins," which spoke in a syntax closer to Hollywood's, "The Wind" doesn't paint over its political arguments with a patina of nostalgia.
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90A sombrely beautiful dream of the violent Irish past. Refusing the standard flourishes of Irish wildness or lyricism, Loach has made a film for our moment, a time of bewildering internecine warfare.
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90Loach's cast fits perfectly, and his directing has his usual extra tang of commitment. He provides almost a sensory response to his material: we seem to feel the textures and scent the air.
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88The Wind that Shakes the Barley is a multi-layered story, and the more you see those different aspects, the more you'll enjoy the film.
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88Beautifully shot, both in darkened homes and on the misty green Irish landscape by Loach's frequent cinematographer Barry Aykroyd, "Wind" has a you-are-there intensity and intimacy about it that make it nearly overwhelming. But for all its violence and subsequent sadness, it's a movie of extraordinary importance.
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88Gripping, powerful, heart-breaking.
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88The vicious clamor the film occasioned in the U.K. is simply the measure of how volatile a subject the relationship between England and Ireland remains more than eight decades after the film's events, and the thinking viewer can hardly help but see parallels between the Irish insurgency and all subsequent guerrilla conflicts.
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80With so many thrills, Loach has completed one hell of a multi-functioning work.
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80That title would suit a melodrama with an emphasis on doomed love, which is not what Loach has crafted. There is a (chaste) love story and plenty of bloodletting. But what engages him and his screenwriter, Paul Laverty, is the growing tension between brother Irish rebels.
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Like Jean-Pierre Melville's recently rediscovered "Army of Shadows," The Wind That Shakes the Barley possesses the soul of an anti-war movie and the style of a thriller.
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80Some of Mr. Loach's earlier feature films have been easier to admire than to enjoy. This one, which won the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival, fairly vibrates with dramatic energy.
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80Director Ken Loach is full of astonishments. An avowedly leftist filmmaker, he has always seen beyond political cant to compassionate reality. He's also incredibly sensitive to what might be called the nuances of life, and he always brings a high sense of spontaneous reality to his films.
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Paul Laverty's script is a masterpiece of ambivalent populism.
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75We may not need another IRA movie, but even so, Ken Loach's Brit-bashing historical drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley, winner of the top prize at Cannes last year, raises hard questions about Ireland's uncanny ability to kneecap itself.
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75The historical scope of this story, as well as Loach's interest in absolute fairness, seems to have drained some of the life from its telling.
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75It's a film that approaches greatness and then fumbles.
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75This is a war film with an anti-epic feel, best when it forgoes the forced march of plot to hunker down in the trenches of our flawed humanity.
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75If Loach had given full voice to each side of this division, he could have made a great film -- maybe THE great film -- about the Irish struggle.
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75There are moments that stir, and it's always lovely, but it's generally too remote to gain hold of you truly.
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75There's a kind of dry tastefulness about The Wind That Shakes The Barley's historical recreations, even when Loach is staging rapes and executions.
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75Intermittently gripping, but overlong.
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70As frequently happens in both Loach films and history, the betrayal of ideals, socialist and otherwise, leaves a harsh aftertaste, which made me feel sadder but not much wiser.
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60Though tastily lensed and with a convincing cast led by Cillian Murphy, essentially small-scale picture lacks the involving sweep of Loach's earlier historical-political yarn, "Land and Freedom."
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50Atmospheric but pedestrian, it is a retelling of the classic tragedy of all civil wars, from the U.S. to Vietnam to England, where brother is pitched against brother.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 15
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Mixed: 2 out of 15
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Negative: 2 out of 15
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