From Jim Sheridan's Oscar-laden 1990s to the Cartoon Saloon animation studio and the new wave of Irish-language cinema, ten essential Irish films from one of Europe's most quietly remarkable small national cinemas.
Irish cinema is small in scale and outsized in achievement. The 1990s saw a run of Oscar nominations for Jim Sheridan, Neil Jordan, and Alan Parker that established the country as a serious filmmaking destination. The early 2000s brought Cartoon Saloon, the Kilkenny animation studio whose three Oscar-nominated features helped redefine what European animation could do. The contemporary scene — McDonagh, Carney, Bairéad, Peppiatt — is producing some of the most exciting English-language work in current cinema.
This list spans thirty-six years and includes three Academy Award winners, two Palme d'Or laureates, and a long list of BAFTA and IFTA citations. Whether you're new to Irish cinema or filling in the gaps, here are ten films you need to watch.
1. My Left Foot (1989)
Dir. Jim Sheridan · Ireland / UK · Biography / Drama
Daniel Day-Lewis gives the performance that won him his first Academy Award, as the Irish writer and painter Christy Brown, who lived with severe cerebral palsy and could only consistently control his left foot. Brenda Fricker, also winning at the Oscars, plays his mother. Jim Sheridan's debut feature, adapted from Brown's autobiography, became one of the foundational films of the modern Irish cinema renaissance.
Day-Lewis's commitment to the role (he reportedly refused to leave his wheelchair throughout the shoot, requiring crew members to feed him between takes) became the basis of his subsequent reputation as the most demanding screen actor of his generation. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards and won two; it remains, more than three decades later, the high-water mark of late-twentieth-century Irish prestige cinema.
2. The Commitments (1991)
Dir. Alan Parker · UK / Ireland / US · Comedy / Drama / Music
A young north Dublin music fan (Robert Arkins) recruits a band from the housing estates of his neighbourhood with a single objective: to bring American soul music to working-class Ireland. Alan Parker's adaptation of Roddy Doyle's novel is one of the most beloved Irish films ever made, a comedy about ambition, class, and the music that crosses between cultures.
The film won the BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay and produced one of the most successful soundtrack albums of its decade. Glen Hansard, then a teenager in his real-life band The Frames, plays the band's guitarist; he would later star in Once and win an Academy Award for Best Original Song. The film's affection for the people it depicts has not aged a day.
3. The Crying Game (1992)
Dir. Neil Jordan · UK / Ireland · Crime / Drama / Romance / Thriller
An IRA volunteer (Stephen Rea) holds a captured British soldier (Forest Whitaker) in a Northern Irish farmhouse. The relationship that develops between them, and the events that follow, became the basis of one of the most internationally discussed Irish films of its decade. Neil Jordan's film won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and was nominated for five further Oscars.
The film's central moment of revelation — preserved with extraordinary discipline at the time of release — has become one of the most-cited passages in 1990s cinema. Beyond the surface of its plotting, the film is a serious and unsettling work about identity, performance, and the limits of categorisation. Jaye Davidson received an Oscar nomination for the supporting role.
4. In the Name of the Father (1993)
Dir. Jim Sheridan · Ireland / UK / US · Biography / Drama / History
Jim Sheridan's second collaboration with Daniel Day-Lewis is a courtroom drama based on the case of Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four, wrongly convicted of an IRA pub bombing in 1974 and imprisoned for fifteen years. Day-Lewis plays Conlon; Pete Postlethwaite plays his father, who was also imprisoned in connection with the case.
The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Supporting Actor. Day-Lewis and Postlethwaite together produce some of the most powerful father-son scenes in modern cinema. Sheridan's screenplay (with Terry George) handles the politics of the Troubles with a clarity rare in films of its kind. The most morally serious British-Irish co-production of its decade.
5. Once (2007)
Dir. John Carney · Ireland · Drama / Music / Romance
A Dublin street busker (Glen Hansard) and a young Czech immigrant pianist (Markéta Irglová) record an album together over a few days. John Carney's micro-budget feature was made for around 150,000 euros and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song (for "Falling Slowly") and a long list of independent festival prizes.
The film's improvised dialogue and naturalistic shooting (much of it filmed without permits on the streets of Dublin) gives it a quality of being lived rather than performed. Hansard and Irglová's musical chemistry produced not just one of the most beloved film soundtracks of its decade but a long real-life collaboration as The Swell Season. The film was later adapted into a Tony-winning Broadway musical. A small film with a long afterlife.
6. The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006)
Dir. Ken Loach · Ireland / UK · Drama / History / War
Ken Loach's portrait of two brothers (Cillian Murphy and Pádraic Delaney) caught up in the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War that followed it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2006. Loach is English, but the film is an Irish co-production and was made with extraordinary attention to the historical and political detail of West Cork in the 1920s.
The film was hugely controversial in the British press on its release — accused of historical bias by columnists who, in many cases, had not seen it — and went on to become the highest-grossing Irish-set independent film at the British box office. Murphy, in his pre-Peaky Blinders career, gives one of his finest performances. A film that takes the founding violence of the Irish state with absolute moral seriousness.
7. The Guard (2011)
Dir. John Michael McDonagh · Ireland · Comedy / Crime / Drama
An unconventional Garda sergeant in rural Connemara (Brendan Gleeson) is paired with an FBI agent (Don Cheadle) sent from America to investigate a multi-million-euro drug trafficking operation in his patch. John Michael McDonagh's debut feature was the highest-grossing Irish independent film of its decade on its release.
Gleeson's central performance is one of the great pieces of Irish screen comedy: a character who is at once obstructive, lazy, occasionally racist, and unmistakably moral when it counts. Cheadle is the perfect foil. McDonagh would later make Calvary (also with Gleeson) and his brother Martin would build on the Gleeson-Farrell pairing for The Banshees of Inisherin. A film that helped redefine what Irish genre cinema could look like.
8. Sing Street (2016)
Dir. John Carney · Ireland / UK · Drama / Musical / Romance
A teenage boy (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) at a tough Dublin Christian Brothers school in 1985 forms a band, mostly to impress a girl. John Carney's third musical feature is partly autobiographical and is among the most affectionately observed coming-of-age films of recent decades.
The film's original songs (written with Gary Clark and including "Drive It Like You Stole It" and "Up") are some of the strongest film-music compositions of their decade. The young cast — Walsh-Peelo, Mark McKenna, and Lucy Boynton — are extraordinary. The film was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Comedy and remains the most internationally beloved Irish musical of the past twenty years.
9. The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
Dir. Martin McDonagh · Ireland / UK · Drama / Comedy
Martin McDonagh's fourth feature reunites the In Bruges pairing of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson on a fictional island off the west coast of Ireland in 1923. One morning, Gleeson's character announces that he will no longer speak to Farrell's, the man who has been his closest friend for years. The Irish Civil War rumbles on the mainland in the background.
The film was nominated for nine Academy Awards including Best Picture, won the Volpi Cup at Venice for Farrell, and is widely considered the most accomplished Irish film of the past decade. Carter Burwell's score, the production design, and the supporting performances from Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan all operate at an exceptional level. A film that builds enormous emotional weight from a deceptively simple premise.
10. The Quiet Girl (2022)
Dir. Colm Bairéad · Ireland · Drama
The first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best International Feature. A nine-year-old girl from a difficult home in 1980s rural Ireland is sent for the summer to live with distant relatives in another part of the country. Colm Bairéad's adaptation of Claire Keegan's short story "Foster" is one of the most quietly moving Irish films of recent decades.
The film won seven IFTAs (the Irish Film and Television Awards), including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Lead Actress for the young Catherine Clinch. It was also a major commercial success, the highest-grossing Irish-language film ever released in Ireland. Cinematographer Kate McCullough's work in 4:3 aspect ratio is genuinely beautiful. A film of extraordinary tact and care.
The Irish Tradition
What unites these ten films, despite the thirty-six years between the earliest and latest, is a serious engagement with the Irish past — the Civil War, the Troubles, the social conservatism of mid-century Ireland, the conditions of the working-class Dublin estates of the 1980s. Irish cinema has rarely allowed itself the consoling fictions that other small national cinemas have used to flatter their audiences.
The other through-line is the centrality of music. The Commitments, Once, and Sing Street are all films built around the act of making music; the soundtracks of the McDonagh and Sheridan films use Irish folk and traditional music with particular care. The Irish musical tradition has produced one of the most distinctive sub-genres of modern English-language cinema.
Honourable Mention: Kneecap (2024)
Dir. Rich Peppiatt · Ireland / UK · Comedy / Drama / Music
The story of the Belfast Irish-language hip-hop group of the same name, played in the film by the actual band members. Rich Peppiatt's debut feature is genuinely funny, formally inventive, and a serious argument for the political potential of minority-language popular culture. The film became Ireland's submission for the Academy Awards. A reminder that the Irish-language cinema renaissance signalled by The Quiet Girl is producing more than just one kind of film.
Where to Start
If you're new to Irish cinema, Once and Sing Street are immediately accessible and showcase the country's musical tradition at its best. For something more ambitious, The Banshees of Inisherin is the most rewarding recent release. For a single film that captures the long Irish twentieth century, In the Name of the Father is the most powerful entry on this list.
If you enjoyed this list, explore our companion guides — our 10 Must-Watch British Films and our 10 Must-Watch European Films of 2025.
