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Jimmy's Hall

✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

United Kingdom, Ireland, France · 2014
Rated PG-13 · 1h 46m
Director Ken Loach
Starring Barry Ward, Simone Kirby, Jim Norton, Andrew Scott
Genre Drama, History

In the 1930s, political activist Jimmy Gralton is deported to the United States after his socialist beliefs drew suspicion from the government. After ten years in exile, he returns to Ireland. Angry at the poverty and oppression still ravaging his country, he seeks to reopen the revolutionary dance hall that led to his deportation.

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What are critics saying?

63

Slant Magazine by Chuck Bowen

Ken Loach's staging is so calm and sober that it turns his story into an expertly photographed yet weirdly remote rebellion tale.

80

Time Out London by Dave Calhoun

Politics and entertainment are never an easy mix, and Jimmy’s Hall is a familiar, slightly unsurprising coming together of the two from Loach and his writer Paul Laverty. Sometimes you can see the joins, but there’s also great warmth, charm and humour among the ideas, and the sense of time and place is especially strong.

75

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

A minor work by Loach's standards, the movie nevertheless marks his most enjoyable effort in years.

63

New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme

As lovely as Jimmy’s Hall is, Paul Laverty’s script is not so much talky as speech-y. Some conversations play like bullet points about Irish politics and the iron grip of the Catholic Church.

50

The Playlist by Jessica Kiang

It’s a twee and tweedy period “Footloose,” into which Loach’s trademark left wing sympathies are not so much woven as photocopied and stapled onto alternate pages of the script.

40

CineVue by John Bleasdale

The characters of Jimmy's Hall aren't really characters as much as archetypes: the saintly mother, the sweetheart, the hero, the villain. This is the kind of film where people don't argue - they debate - speaking in lines from manifestos and creating an incongruity.

50

The Hollywood Reporter by Neil Young

For the first time his ongoing collaboration with scriptwriter Paul Laverty, Loach's studiously safe-hands approach -- typified by regular collaborator George Fenton's near-incessant score -- can't counterbalance fundamental screenplay flaws.

40

The Telegraph by Robbie Collin

This is exasperatingly thin stuff from Loach and Laverty, who have in the past built far more textured narratives, peopled by far richer characters, even while maintaining the fierce, politicised charge they aim for here.

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