Jim Sheridan
Between 1989 and 1993 he directed three films in Ireland that would be a complete career for most people: My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown, The Field and In the Name of the Father. All three are about men trapped by a father, a piece of land or a state, and all three run on the same conviction, that a performance held long enough will do more work than any plot mechanism. He has six Academy Award nominations, along with a Golden Bear and a Goya for best European film.
The subject barely changes across the whole filmography. The Boxer is about a man coming out of prison into a community that has moved on without him. In America is about a family arriving in New York carrying a grief they will not discuss. Brothers is about what a soldier brings back with him. Fathers, sons, exile and the price of silence, over and over, and when it lands it is devastating precisely because he refuses to hurry anyone through it.
It has not always landed. Get Rich or Die Tryin' and Dream House are the weakest things on this page by a wide margin, and The Secret Scripture never quite found the film inside its novel. He acts occasionally too, in small parts: a priest in Moll Flanders, the King of Spain in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, an Irishman in the 2025 Juliet and Romeo.
Movies (13)
- Brothers (2009)
- Get Rich or Die Tryin' (2005)
- In the Name of the Father (1993)
- My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown (1989)
- The Boxer (1997)
- Dream House (2011)
- Moll Flanders (1996)
- The Field (1990)
- Juliet & Romeo (2025)
- The Secret Scripture (2017)
- In America (2003)
- The General (1998)
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004)
Where to start with Jim Sheridan
Nobody should start anywhere but My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown, still the strongest thing here, an unsentimental film about a difficult man that never once asks you to pity him.
Follow it with In the Name of the Father, angrier and more conventional in structure but carrying the best father-and-son work in his filmography. The Field is the hardest of the Irish three and the most theatrical. In America turns the same instincts on an Irish family emigrating to New York, and it is the one most likely to move you. The Boxer is underrated and quietly excellent. Brothers is his American remake of a Danish film, competent rather than necessary. Leave Dream House and Get Rich or Die Tryin' until you are curious about what a good director's off days look like.