Philomena

Stephen Frears' Philomena grew out of journalist Martin Sixsmith's 2009 book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, which traced a real Irishwoman's fifty-year search for the son she had been forced to give up to a Magdalene laundry in the 1950s. Steve Coogan optioned the book, co-wrote the screenplay with Jeff Pope and cast himself opposite Judi Dench. Their odd-couple road movie turned into one of the surprise hits of the 2013 awards season.

It won Best Screenplay at Venice and the BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay, and earned four Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Actress for Dench, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score for Alexandre Desplat. Frears, by then thirty years into a career that had taken in My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons and The Queen, keeps the register low, almost television-modest, and leaves Dench and Coogan to do the work.

After the film came out, the real Philomena Lee became a public advocate for adoption-rights reform, founding The Philomena Project to campaign for access to records held by religious institutions in Ireland. Alongside The Magdalene Sisters, it belongs among the films that pushed the Irish state to acknowledge the abuses of its mother-and-baby homes, and an apology from the Taoiseach followed in 2021.