The 20 best Irish movies to watch on St. Patrick’s Day

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.

A wrenchingly beautiful Irish immigrant drama, this extraordinary film 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.

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.

Americans are certainly even less familiar with Gaelic hip-hop trio Kneecap than they are Robbie Williams, but don’t let that put you off this faux-biopic, starring the three Belfast hooligans in question, whose insistence on rapping in their native tongue made them political targets and the toast of young Irish looking to rebel against their country’s history. In its kinetic rush of music, drugs and antiauthoritarianism, the film resembles a post-Britpop Trainspotting, but it’s hardly a cautionary tale. Instead, it’s a call to cause a ruckus, especially if it pisses off the right people.

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.”

Approaching the Anglo-Irish War and the ensuing Irish Civil War like one of his signature social dramas, director Ken Loach’s Palm d’Or-winner explores the ideological divisions which, post-revolution, turned allies into enemies and brother against brother. Cillian Murphy, fresh off Batman Begins, is remarkable as a medical student in a small County Cork farm town spurred into joining the IRA, eventually putting his country and socialist ideals above even his own flesh-and-blood. It’s bleak, but in a way that, as typical with Loach, remains painfully human. 

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’ life. The politics are a touch messianic, but the physical commitment of actor Michael Fassbender is astounding—this film marks his arrival to greatness.

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.

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 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.

A tiny village in rural Ireland is rocked by news that one of their own has won the national lottery, and no one more than the winner himself – a guy named Ned, who’s found dead in his home with the winning ticket in his hand. What follows is a lighthearted but mischievous small-town comedy a la Local Hero or The Full Monty, as the residents conspire to keep the money in the community. An enduring charmer.

Gorgeously conceived by American director John Sayles, this Celtic folk tale is aimed at young adults, but it’s hard to imagine a demographic that wouldn’t be enchanted by it. A young orphan is sent to live with her grandparents in a fishing village on the coast of Ulster, where locals tell tales of mythical seal-people known as ‘selkies’ – a legend that may hold the key to her infant brother’s mysterious disappearance years earlier.

A shy young girl, often neglected in the chaos of her crowded family home, is sent to stay on a farm in County Waterford with her childless relatives for the summer, and in the tranquil mundanity of their daily routine, feels seen and loved for the first time. Sounds like a small movie, and it is, but Colm Bairéad’s gently moving debut feature made a big impact, becoming both the highest-grossing Irish-language film  ever and the first to be nominated for an Academy Award. Catherine Clinch’s lead performance is the key, deeply internalized but full of life.

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.