Martin Bradley The future of home-grown Irish cinema seems safely in the bag for the time being. We have just had John Carney's "Once" which was a breath of fresh air as well as being a critical and commercial smash. Now we have Derry's own Tom Collins' superb screen version of the play "The Kings of Kilburn High Road" and it may turn out to be the best film yet about the Irish diaspora. It's a stunner and could see Ireland short-listed in the Best Foreign Film category at this year's Oscars.The plot is simple and there is nothing new in it. Five friends, all immigrants from Ireland's Conemara, gather for the wake of a sixth killed by a train in the London Underground. During a long night's drinking, regrets and recriminations rise to the surface together with ghosts from their pasts. There is a touch of Eugene O'Neill here certainly, (Irishness and alcohol figured largely in his work), but as the night wears on and drunkenness breaks down the men's bravado, the film broadens out into a more universal study of machismo. Although a painfully accurate record of both the Irish way of death and drinking these could be any group of old friends in any bar anywhere in the world.The bar-room setting of the film's second half exposes its theatrical origins but Collins opens it out superbly and the flashbacks to earlier days never seem intrusive. He keeps it briskly cinematic throughout and the performances of the whole cast can't be faulted. This is a superb ensemble piece and at a festival the performance of the five principals, (and of Peadar O'Taraigh as the dead man's father), would be worthy of a joint best actor award. However, I am inclined to single out Brendan Conroy as Git. Git may seem at first the weakest of the group but in Conroy's extraordinary performance he proves himself the strongest. Like the film itself, Conroy deserves the highest of praise.

Jay Kings is a very fine film. It is a haunting, melancholic portrait of lost souls, the people on our streets who once belonged to some place, somewhere in another time, but who have fallen out of touch with the world around them. Director Tom Collins seizes on this feeling of loneliness and misplacement and forces us to confront it, as we immerse ourselves in the lives of Git, Jap, Máirtín, Shay and Joe. The haunting, ghostly memory of Jackie makes us also mourn his passing, as he appears to his friends between sleeping and waking, between day and night.Indeed the film itself feels caught in time between dusk and dawn, as the characters let the world pass by in the final third of the film, when an ominous, creeping awareness invades on their drunken reverie. The atmosphere is one of a suspended moment – the group of friends toast their lost companion in an eerie, empty back room, whilst muffled noise just creeps in from the bar outside. The Irish language they speak amongst themselves reflects the otherness of their lives, their misplacement in this world. As they leave and come back, it is as if they move from one world to the other, and when they finally go, they could be gone forever.With excellent performances and a taut script, the evocative cinematography and soundtrack make this an achingly sad and beautiful work that is timeless in it's relevance.

fransafehome Kings plunges its viewers into the harsh reality of five Irish immigrant's lives in London. The men are separated not only geographically, but psychologically, from their homeland. They yearn to return, but are consumed with a sense of their own failure and fear rejection from loved ones at home. Instead they immerse themselves in alcohol and unfulfilled dreams. The acting is superb; the characters true-to-life; the theme universal. The use of Gaelic is a dramatic tool that serves to emphasize their alienation again in their adopted town of Kilburn. It is a story of sadness and regret and how individuals deal with pain. Tom Collins's movie challenges the audience to question their own relationships with fellow human beings, especially those from whom they are estranged, and especially those who were forced to leave these shores. It challenges us to question our views on this lost generation and to look at an era in our history that allowed such mass immigration. Hopefully, Kings will open up a national debate on how a Government could have failed its subjects and allowed a land to be bled of its inhabitants; hopefully,it will inspire us to welcome them home with open arms; hopefully it will encourage the present Government to continue to provide the means to do so. Go and see Kings. You will not be disappointed.

yawgmoth_742 I was dragged to this film by a Gaelic-Irish fanatic friend of mine. He described it as "an Irish film", and I expected an English-language one. (I'm Irish, and have lived here in Dublin my whole life, and like most Irish people, haven't the foggiest interest in the Gaelic language now that I am done in school.) I may have brought some of my anti-Gaelic bias into the film with me, but it must be borne in mind that when I saw "Yu Ming is Ainm Dom" I was trapped in the Irish education system, and inherently resented the language more than I do now, but I still really loved that short film.This film, however, is sorely lacking.For starters, it is technically poor. I am used to seeing hand-held camera work (I assume that's what it was...) in war films and the like, when it has a purpose, but it seemed that this film's crew really didn't know how to hold the thing steady. The subtitles, given that this film was made primarily for a "foreign" (Anglophone) audience, left much to be desired: there were at least one or two misprints, and a number of instances of the word "I" simply being replaced with an apostrophe.The plot is trite - a man has died, and his friends and father come together to mourn him. (Well, honestly it's a little more complicated than that, but it's still not very enthralling.) The filming locations (according to IMDb and my friend's research) were a complete waste of money. There was absolutely nothing in the film that could not have been shot just about anywhere in Ireland to the same effect, but they apparently had no qualms (even on what was obviously a modest budget) shipping every member of a substantial enough cast and crew over to London.To touch upon the sociological implications of a film that obviously considers itself to be very politically charged, I will make but two points. I have heard many Irish people complain about stereotypes of the drunken Irish, but I really don't think the people who expect this film to be seen abroad have any right to complain, given the image they apparently don't mind promoting. Secondly, how long is it going to take watching British television and spending large amounts of time in England for nationalists in this country to realize that not every last English person is that villainous (at least not anymore). In my experience, most young Britons have no problem acknowledging some of the bad things their soldiers did abroad back in the day. (I'd say they will always regard "Once Upon a Time in China" or "Fearless" more highly than this film...) But the way the bartender effectively bans the characters from speaking Irish-Gaelic at her bar shows the kind of bias the writers had.Lastly, I should point out the fact that the "Micil" character doesn't seem to age much in the 30 years separating the main story from the flashback, and in the main story he seems to be not all that much older than his son's friends. Maybe that's what all that alcohol did to them...Anyway, to sum up, a politically controversial film, with little going for it in terms of either plot or imagery. Avoid like the plague (unless your teacher forces you to see it).