| “For director Ken Loach, the personal is always political, the political personal. The dean of British independent filmmakers, Loach has the gift of finding the intensely moving private emotions in broad, societal dilemmas. He does that with his fine new film, "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," and he does a few new things as well.
Barley is the only one of Loach's works to receive Cannes' prestigious Palme d'Or. It is also one of the first to utilize a recognizable international star: Cillian Murphy, memorable as the evil Scarecrow in Batman Begins. And it is only the second of Loach's 19 films (after Land and Freedom) to be set in a politically charged past rather than a socially committed present. Named after a poem that favored Irish independence from Britain, Barley takes place in Ireland in the early 1920s, a time that remains so controversial that some British newspapers savagely attacked Loach's film, even going so far as to compare the director to Third Reich glorifier Leni Riefenstahl. But Barley starts quietly, with an afternoon game of hurling on land near Cork belonging to Sinead (Orla Fitzgerald) and her family. Among the players are Damien (Murphy), set to begin a medical residency in London in a few days, and his brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney). Suddenly, the afternoon explodes as a platoon of gun-toting Black and Tans appears. They're thuggish British troops determined to humiliate and demean the Irish for daring to gather for any purpose at all....”
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