Loach's ability to sweep you up in his action, movement and drama has never been so marked.

Rating: 9/10 (16 February 2007)

The critics who condemn this movie for its IRA sympathies are missing the point. Loach shows you the IRA in its early days, when its sole purpose was to fight the armed and uniformed occupiers of their land. They owed the English nothing. The English had treated the Irish with little but brutality for centuries, and the appearance in 1920 of a new but still brutal military force, the Black and Tans, was too much. Every decent young Irishman sympathised with the movement to fight them. It was only later that the IRA turned to terrorism against civilians, using bombs to kill the innocent along with the guilty. Understand that, and you will not fall into the trap of labelling the film 'anti-British'.
The film has been called 'one-sided'. Of course it is. It's not the function of a work of art to present a balanced argument. Was Picasso's Guernica a balanced argument? If in addition to the horror of the bombing it had presented the point of view of General Franco, who was fighting what he believed to be the threat of communism, Picasso's masterpiece would have been laughed at. The Wind That Shakes the Barley deserves to be treated as art.