Movie Reviews for Dancing At Lughnasa

Dancing At Lughnasa

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Movie Reviews of Dancing At Lughnasa

Movie Review: A Moving Piece
Summary: 4 Stars

I don't understand a number of the earlier reviewers who criticize this piece for not being comedic and ending sadly. Have we no place for tragedy, whether in plays or movies, in our lives? Must all creative works be comedic and end happily (contrary to real life)? I suggest we move past the 30's - 40's movies of "Snow White".

Life is often tragic and we need to see that. If you do not wish to see tragedy, don't criticize the film for showing you it. There are plenty of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck shorts and horrible Jennfier Aniston romantic comedies. I appreciate even this watered-down movie version of Brian Friel's play for showing us hard times, difficult feelings, prejudices, and ultimately family love. This is about being an adult, facing the realities of human suffering, and looking those realities squarely in the face.

Movie Review: Waiting To Dance
Summary: 3 Stars

Not having seen the play, I seem to be at a tremendous disadvantage to appreciate this film. It seems like anything so strongly rooted in Celtic traditions, pagan and Catholic, should be spectacular. I kept waiting for something to happen....it certainly is always getting ready to happen, but the script never triggers that flood of Irish Green emotion that it always so close to the surface of all good Irish literature and art.

About the only redeeming characters are the brother Priest, who has managed to let his addled head be converted to the great heart-of-Africa primitivistic traditions (with the great scripting from the play which allow his missionary stories to parallel their Celtic neighbours' Lugan festival fires burning on the nearby ridges at night). What a great story line to let his fumbling spirit be drawn to the only time and place when he could actually rescue his simple sister. This is the great moment. I only wish the film had been able to convert what seemed to be the other dozens of latent moments waiting to sail off into my memory of the story. Alas, it was not to be.

I am now hoping the play runs again somewhere so I can catch it. I would love to see somebody else take a shot at making this one work on the big screen....it's just there, waiting patiently for a young director to re-discover it 20 years from now and make the great film that is really in there!

Movie Review: A very sad movie
Summary: 3 Stars

This movie is a very different picture of 30's Ireland than inThe Informer - Authentic Region 1 DVD from Warner Brothers with Victor McLaglen, Heather Angel, Preston Foster and Directed by JOHN FORD. The Catholic church abandoning an old sick priest after years
of service in a leper colony in Africa and then, firing his sister by association,
just is hard to place in the ideas of any kind of church?
The "going native" of this Irish priest really doesn't seem to be his fault.
The result was in the end tragic for the family
with a young boy to raise. The movie just has a lot of heart and
no real point that I could figure.
I didn't like the movie.

Movie Review: Dancing at Lughnasa
Summary: 3 Stars

Superb cast and artistry notwithstanding, this is surely one of the most depressing films I've ever seen. The case art displays a smiling Streep over the dancing sisters, suggesting joy. However, the dancing scene is the ONE scene that conveys any joy at all, and is followed by a devastating emotional free-fall. I wept. This film got inside me, and haunts me still. Not a happy movie. Lesson learned: I won't buy a movie when I'm in too big of a hurry to be careful; the picture on the box might deceive.