The 13 best Irish movies for St. Patrick’s Day

Is it too soon to include so recent a movie? Not when it’s this extraordinary. A wrenchingly beautiful Irish immigrant drama, it re-creates the titular 1950s-era borough in all its melting-pot diversity (and Dodgers-loving Italian boyfriends), while also giving the 21-year-old Saoirse Ronan the kind of role—romantically conflicted, blooming, courageously open—that transforms young stars into icons.

This small, unassuming indie-folk musical about the unspoken love affair between a Dublin street musician (Glen Hansard) and a Czech immigrant (Markéta Irglová) snuck up on the world when it was first released, earning an Oscar for Best Original Song and spinning off into a successful stage play. It’s easy to see why: it’s utterly bewitching, and the relationship between the two leads feels almost painfully genuine – in fact, Hansard and Irglová briefly became a real couple afterward.

Recognizing John Wayne’s greatness will always be hard for those who can’t wrap their heads around his big-lug persona and palpable conservatism. To them, we offer this sensitive Ireland-set drama, in which Wayne plays a washed-up boxer, as Exhibit A. Maureen O’Hara is the firebrand who sets him on the straight and narrow.

A stirring piece of soul-music camaraderie, Alan Parker’s comedy about the formation of a band still has the power to inspire. It speaks to Ireland directly, best in the words of its wanna-be combo leader: “Do you not get it, lads? The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud.”

A background in Celtic folklore isn’t necessary to appreciate this wondrous animated tale from Kilkenny’s Cartoon Saloon, though it probably wouldn’t hurt. Even if you know nothing about the Book of Kells, the pagan god Crom Cruach and the art of Irish visual poetry, the film’s breathtaking animation and mesmeric tone will draw viewers of any age into its gorgeous spell.

Writer-director Martin McDonagh first paired Brendan Gleeson and Colin Ferrell as odd-couple hitmen stuck hiding out in a quaint Belgian tourist town in 2008’s In Bruges. Fourteen years later, they’re stuck together in the same place again, but this time, it’s the only place either of them have ever known: a small, remote island off the Irish coast. Ferrell’s Pádraic Súilleabháin is content to spend his life shooting the shite at the pub. When Gleeson’s Colm Doherty comes to see him as an albatross, he severs their friendship, which eventually leads him to sever several other things. Like most of McDonagh’s work, it’s sad and bleakly funny in equal measure – a particularly Irish quality.

No one would claim that director Lance Daly delivers an Emerald Isle version of The Spirit of the Beehive, though this scrappy film about two Irish kids who ditch their working-class ’hood and head into Dublin does have a knack for capturing the elation and confusion of late childhood in all its ragged glory.

In this powerful drama, Jim Sheridan explores the father-son relationship between Gerry and Giuseppe Conlon (Daniel Day-Lewis and Pete Postlethwaite), who were wrongly convicted of a 1975 IRA bombing. Director Sheridan and Day-Lewis already mined Oscar gold with their 1989 collaboration My Left Foot, but this one’s better.

British artist and director Steve McQueen (he’d go on to make 12 Years a Slave) dramatizes six brutal weeks at the end of IRA faster Bobby Sands’s life. The politics are a touch messianic, but the physical commitment of actor Michael Fassbender is astounding—this film marks his arrival to greatness.

Whether from Dublin, Middle America or the Amazonian rainforest, teenagers have always started bands for precisely two reasons: to get laid and/or to get the hell out of their hometown. Once director John Carney encapsulates both of those impulses in this winning ‘80s-set pop musical about a private school misfit who puts together a group only after recruiting his crush to star in a music video. While it indulges in plenty of coming-of-age clichés, the energy stays high, the tunes are killer, and it ends up expressing a broad truth – that loving Ireland, like any place else, sometimes means escaping it.

In this wickedly funny Tarantino-esque black comedy, the mighty Brendan Gleeson (weathered and effortlessly humane) plays Father James, targeted for murder in the confession box by an angry mystery man. James is given seven days to put his affairs in order—and hopefully mend some bridges in his coastal Irish community.

Yes, it’s the same bloody Sunday about which U2 wonders how long they’ll have to sing: the events of Jan 30, 1972, when English soldiers killed 13 unarmed Irish protesters. Paul Greengrass’s impeccable historical re-creation, suffused with heartache, set the template for his future work on United 93.

Overshadowed by its own secret (and Miramax’s aggro marketing campaign of same), Neil Jordan’s sexually charged political thriller is actually quite lovely, redolent of the director’s generous humanism, and featuring excellent work by Forest Whitaker as a British soldier with a secret life captured by the IRA.