Critics reviews

This is Loach's most provocative film in ages, and it's also among his most dramatically compelling. And it is so for reasons that transcend the strict limits of its argument: Loach might question the terms of this analysis, but if The Wind That Shakes the Barley demands to be seen, it's as much for its poetics as for its politics.

As a so-called period film, "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" feels breathtakingly authentic, but never "old." [It] may be a historical piece, [but] it's history told in the vivid present tense.

“The Wind That Shakes the Barley” turns out to be a more complicated, more dramatically potent story than it appears at first. It’s concerned at its core not with how bad the British were but with what the cost of dealing with them was for the Irish.

The history presented in ''The Wind That Shakes the Barley'' hardly feels like a closed book or a museum display. It is as alive and as troubling as anything on the evening news, though far more thoughtful and beautiful.

"The Wind That Shakes the Barley" doesn’t play like a socialist tract: It’s deep-textured, steeped in Irish melancholy. The Cork County countryside is hardscrabble yet sublime: a mythic stage for a film about the tensions that tear even the most loyal families apart.

[It] corresponds to leftist agitprop in some particulars, but confounds predictable political agendas in others... As frequently happens in both Loach films and history, the betrayal of ideals, socialist and otherwise, leaves a harsh aftertaste, which made me feel sadder but not much wiser.

Atmospheric but pedestrian, it is a retelling of the classic tragedy of all civil wars, from the U.S. to Vietnam to England, where brother is pitched against brother. The film looks handsomely authentic, and the familiar characters are engaging, but the story is predictable... Loach provides plenty of time for arguments on all sides of the political issue, and while that is important, those scenes slow down the film badly.

There's a kind of dry tastefulness about The Wind That Shakes The Barley's historical recreations, even when Loach is staging rapes and executions. And the brother-against-brother plot feels spent from the start... And yet, Loach and Laverty are still capable of creating moments startling in their naturalism—almost like a window into the past.

"The Wind That Shakes the Barley" possesses the soul of an anti-war movie and the style of a thriller, with charcoal figures moving hurriedly against a darkened landscape periodically illuminated by bursts of gunfire.

The ferocity of Loach’s moral wrath carries the movie, makes it ignite on screen — at least, until he tries to dramatize the fatal split of Ireland through Damien and Teddy, the brothers in arms... A movie that presents itself, ultimately, as a tragic portrait of a divided nation fails to explore the deepest reason for that fissure: the Irish who longed to stop fighting because they no longer saw the honor in it.

“The Wind That Shakes the Barley” ... is a beautifully realized work, and perhaps Loach’s best film. Refusing the standard flourishes of Irish wildness or lyricism, Loach has made a film for our moment, a time of bewildering internecine warfare.

[A] comprehensive history lesson with characters standing in as spokesmen for ideologies. And perhaps this is why "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" is ultimately so frustratingly dull. As a document of the shape of political thought, the film is successful; but as a living, beating heart about a populace living through a time of upheaval and confusion, it’s mediocre