Michael Collins

Neil Jordan's Michael Collins won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1996, and Liam Neeson took the Volpi Cup for Best Actor. Coming after his Oscar nomination for Schindler's List, it confirmed Neeson as a leading man; for Jordan, after the Oscar-nominated The Crying Game (1992), it confirmed his place among the most internationally significant Irish directors of his generation.

Neeson plays Collins, the charismatic Irish republican strategist who led the guerrilla war against British rule between 1919 and 1921 and then staked his political life on the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, the compromise that established the Irish Free State at the cost of partitioning Ireland. The film follows his political and personal life through those years: his friendship with Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn), his relationship with the Cork woman Kitty Kiernan (Julia Roberts), and his dealings with Éamon de Valera (Alan Rickman) and the wider republican leadership.

Jordan reconstructs the history with real care, from the occupation of the GPO in 1916 to the assassinations of Auxiliary intelligence officers in November 1920, the Treaty negotiations and the Civil War that followed, and the result is one of the most carefully made pieces of Irish historical cinema. In Ireland, where the Civil War has stayed politically sensitive for a century, reception was complicated by the film's portrait of de Valera. Whatever the historical arguments, it is Neeson's performance, commanding and warm, that has kept the film's reputation intact.