RyothChatty ridiculous rating

Spidersecu Don't Believe the Hype

Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

arthurdaley69 An excellent movie and very unusual in that it is almost entirely 'as gaeilge'. Colm Meaney is the most recognizable actor involved, well for non Irish people he will be anyway, but the supporting cast is equally strong.Having lived in England for a while in the 1990's myself I could readily identify with the constant nagging doubts as to whether they could make a go of it back home or not - if only they had the courage to give it a try.This movie is obviously intensely 'Irish' but it's message could apply to any foreigners anywhere.

defactofilms-1 Bigtraveller (sic) sounds like a big idiot....Kings Abu ! Whenever I see Colm Meaney in anything, I get a warm, fuzzy feeling. It may be the Irish in me coming out -- Meaney was born in Dublin, Ireland -- but it's more likely a residue of his role as Chief Miles O'Brien in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He instantly came across as dignified yet combustible. If he'd been born 50 years earlier, he would have been an ideal supporting character in a ton of classic Hollywood movies.Eventually I discovered some of his earlier work (The Commitments and The Snapper, to name two good ones) and grew to appreciate his rich dramatic abilities. These dramatic abilities are on full display in Kings. The Film was nominated for a record 14 nominations in the IFTAS. Meaney for best supporting actor. Kicks picked up 5, The film which has been submitted by Ireland as their official entrant in the race for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, according to Variety. Kings is based on the play The Kings of Kilburn Road by Irish playwright Jimmy Murphy; multi award winning industry vet Tom Collins wrote the script and produced and directed. The premise is that six men left Ireland for London in search of their fortune. Thirty years have passed with none of their dreams being realized, a point driven home when one of the group dies and the others reunite for his wake. Favourably reviewing the film earlier this year, Jay Weissberg of Variety wrote: "Though unable to completely shed its theatrical origins, Tom Collins' Kings offers a trenchant look at the recent Irish immigrant experience." Weissberg noted that the film is the first bilingual picture produced in Ireland, with the cast speaking a mixture of Irish Gaelic and English.The film had its first public screening at TIFF on Wednesday night; it plays again on Friday morning, September 14. Kings is also scheduled to screen at the Director's Guild of America Theatre in Los Angeles on Friday, September 28, as part of the Directors Finders Series 2007. The latter screening is intended as a showcase for American distributors.Since then it has had a successful theatrical release in the USA and picked up more awards.

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.

doreen2cv A beautifully-made film, "Kings" is one of the best movies of this year. The hand-held camera gives it an intimacy too often absent in close-up cinematic portraiture, and allows the viewer a real look at the shocking sadness of the lives of its subjects. Of a group of five friends who leave the west of Ireland in their teens in the late 1970s, Jackie is the first to die. Herein begins a long journey into oblivion for his four friends, all of them living lives very different from what was envisaged at the start of their English odyssey. What "Kings" does, more than anything, is take a long look at the generations of lost Irish in London, those who left Ireland on the boat to work on the building sites and to clean houses, and the sad waste of the loss of potential to the devils of booze. The films stays away from nostaglia or sentiment, and in doing so it creates for the viewer a real picture of how it was for all the thousands of immigrants, most of whom never saw home again.