by A. Freedman, Staff Writer

Over the years at Cinema76, I compiled an annual list of movies to watch for St. Patrick's Day. For a country without a robust film industry, there is never a shortage of titles to choose from. Many of these come with support from neighboring England, as they do from Hollywood. To celebrate our merging with Movie Jawn, I wanted to do one final St. Patty's Day list, for old thyme's sake.

Sea Fever (dir. Neasa Hardiman, 2019)

Released on VOD in April of 2020, Sea Fever will be forever associated with early COVID lockdown. It is not your typical Irish movie. Instead, it is an aquatic horror feature about a mysterious underwater creature that infects the water supply of a stranded trawler with a lethal parasitic infection. Following in the tradition of The Abyss, Leviathan, and even Jaws, its paranoid tension regarding infection and exposure clearly hit a relatable nerve with viewers last year. It could stand to be about 20% goopier, but you may as well enjoy a single location quarantine thriller now before you would rather forget this last year ever happened.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley (dir. Ken Loach, 2006)

The IRA and the "Troubles" were big business for Hollywood in the 90's, but few if any of those films got at the heart of the issues at hand. A decade later, British director Ken Loach painted a dour portrait of a family torn apart by one of the earlier forks in the road in the centuries old conflict- the 1919 Irish War of Independence, which was followed almost immediately by a year long civil war. Loach has made social issues his cinematic calling card, and here he tells the story plainly and without sentimentality. If you want a compelling history lesson on film, look no further.

The Hole In The Ground (dir. Lee Cronin, 2019)

Ireland has a rich folkloric tradition- which director Lee Cronin mines for terrifiying purposes in the A24 horror film The Hole In The Ground. It follows (heh) a single mother and her young boy, trying to start a new life in rural Ireland. Then they find an enormous sinkhole in the woods behind their house, and young Chris (James Quinn Markey) starts acting different. Unlike other evil kid movies, he isn't acting maliciously or misbehaving- he's just...not quite himself. This "changeling" riff on The Babadook manages to rise above other imitators by digging deeper into the actual horror elements, rather than staying simply in psychological metaphor. By the end, you can see why Cronin has been tapped to take on a new Evil Dead film.

Sing Street (dir. John Carney, 2016)

Sometimes you just need a movie that absolutely delights you. Sing Street is so much that movie, that it made my top ten list of last decade. It is little more than a nostalgic story of a a few teenage boys in 1980's Dublin who start a band- channeling Duran Duran, Hall & Oates, The Cure, and more. Directed by John Carney (Once), it belongs with Say Anything in the pantheon of perfect movies about adolescent fantasy, music, friends, and falling in love for the first time. Plus, the songs are just amazing....almost too amazing to believe that teenagers wrote them, but enough to easily trigger my suspension of disbelief.

The Secret Of Roan Inish (dir. John Sayles, 1994)

Not all Irish folklore is scary stuff about fairy child doppelgangers–some of it is just neat and fanciful, like Selkies–seals that can transform into humans. John Sayles (Matewan, Eight Men Out) directed this feel-good tale about a family in a tiny Irish fishing village in 1946, who have their own close ties to the Selky myth. It is a perfect family movie (perhaps more so for adults- kids might be a little bored, but at least they'll fall asleep)- pleasant and delightful, with gorgeous Haskell Wexler cinematography to boot.