Wordiezett So much average

Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Richard Burin Dancing at Lughnasa (Pat O'Connor, 1996) is an oddly muted drama in which nothing really happens, for an hour and a half. "Progress is a comfortable disease," observed grammar-phobic poet e e cummings. For him, maybe, but for five unmarried sisters in '30s Ireland, it's anything but, as the march of time throws their life together into jeopardy. The spectre of industry and dwindling school rolls are looming, threatening to put teacher Meryl Streep (who is really annoying here, sometimes intentionally) and professional knitters Sophie Thompson and Brid Brennan out of work and break up the family unit. Not that they seem very happy to begin with, bickering and casting light on another's neuroses in a way that becomes quickly wearing very quickly. There's love in the house, for sure, but there's a lot more repression and glumness, much of it uninteresting and trite.As well as the breadwinners, we meet happy-go-lucky Kathy Burke, fifth sister Catherine McCormack - spending a summer with returning lover Rhys Ifans - a clergyman brother ravaged by dementia (Michael Gambon), and young Darrell Johnston, the story told through his eyes. The film has uniformly good performances, but it's often clichéd and unenlightening, with an opening and closing voice-over that apes How Green Was My Valley and seems to bear little relation to the action in between. On the plus side, occasional moments of insight peek through the overbearing script and there are two really good scenes. One has the family flicking through a photo album and recalling lost love; it's a quiet tour-de-force from Burke. The other, which partly gives the film its title, is simply great, as the sisters begin dancing to a song on the radio, their celebrations growing ever more feverish until they spill out into the yard. It's a moment of sheer wonder amid much muddled misery.

indexed-savings I saw this play turned into a movie with my wife from a TIVO copy. We were so moved by its beauty, reality, pathos, characters, and what we took to be an authentic depiction of people and scenery in Ireland, at the time of the Spanish Civil War (1936), and of a certain simplicity in an insecure rural life, that I rushed upstairs to this computer to find out who wrote it--and what others may have made of it.I landed here--where several reviewers confirmed my belief that this is a "keeper". I will save it to be seen (and not to be missed) by all my children and grandchildren. I believe it is a rare chance to meet people whose world is very small, and often very plain, whose words you don't want to miss.

RedAzaelia I watched this movie two years ago while involved in a production of the stage version of the play. My complaint is a common one: stage does not translate well to screen. For instance, anyone who has gone to see, or was involved in, the stage production of Rent will tell you that the movie pales in comparison. The same is true of Dancing At Lughnasa, though the play is not nearly so well-known.My fellow cast members and I were all collectively unimpressed with the movie, and our initial response was "What?". We were already wrapped up in the Dancing At Lughnasa play experience, so perhaps it was different for us than it would be for someone unfamiliar with the play. We just were not drawn in by the movie.It was interesting to see one person's adaptation of the script, and to see the play performed by age-appropriate cast members instead of high school students, but over all, it was ultimately forgettable. Meryl Streep excels as usual, and the acting is alright for the most part, though Michael Gambon is woefully miscast. However, not even Meryl Streep can redeem this movie.The movie's downfall is that it lacks the warmth, intimacy, and heart of the play, and I honestly did not like the movie at all for just that reason. The play is set solely in the Mundy household, while the movie ventures into the town of Ballybeg, up to Lough Anna, and into the Back Hills in an effort to show us a more complete picture. Perhaps the filmmakers believed the audience would be bored or wearied by the little change in scenery, and lots of description of outside events through dialog that the play features. However, the changes disrupt the heartbeat of the story and cause it to appear disjointed and clunky, and suddenly the center of the play, which is the closeness of the five sisters, is lost.The other major problem is that the play is a memory play. That is, it takes place entirely within the memory of one character, in this case the young man Michael. That sense of a young man looking back on one intense, memorable summer is lost in the movie, because instead of having the narrator Michael speak the lines for the boy Michael, there is a young actor who plays the role of the boy. Because I was so familiar and involved with the stage script, in which the boy Michael never appears in physical form and instead is spoken for by the young man Michael as he remembers, I was disoriented by that great difference.Perhaps others who have never read or performed in the play of Dancing At Lughnasa would enjoy it much more than I did. However, I cannot be objective about the film because I love the play so much. My opinion remains.I would highly recommend reading the script, or better yet, going to see a production of the play, instead of watching the movie.The play is a masterpiece of theater.The film is merely mediocre by comparison.

Mashi69 Like all those who have criticized this movie, I too missed the point, because to me it just seemed a less than ordinary movie about ordinary people. I never saw the stage play, perhaps here lies the rub: that kind of continuity that films need (and plays don't, being divided into macro scenes) is totally lacking. The result is that the structure of this movie slackens and shows gaps as big as those of matter at the molecular level. I agree, the setting is beautiful: movies dealing with peoples who have strong traditions and attachment to their land must inevitably try to make the landscape one more actor. But when a work of "art" (lesser art) shows so blatantly its inner pathos-inducing mechanism, then the use of a spectacular landscape just makes things worse, as in the case of Dancing at Lughnasa: "folkloristic" in the worst acceptation of the term. Exemplary in this sense the voice off of the boy, Michael, who in the end has the nerve to say something like "I will remember those years as the most beautiful of my life" after having spent the whole movie interacting with the characters much less than any of the bushes in Mundy family's courtyard.