Captivating movie !

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

In the vein of Dead Poet's Society, we have another inspirational teacher turning up at a staid, formal school in Ireland and transforming the lives of the pupils with his vim and vigour. Only these lads have more problems than most... for a start, they're thought of as little more than animals to be abused and beaten, and there's a bible bashing priest there who'll stop at nothing to show this modern educator and his 'new age' methods the door. Let battle commence...This is quite episodic in content, as we lurch from the boys learning to read and appreciate poetry for the first time, to the nice tutor's various encounters with the psychotic clergyman... which usually revolve round his attempts to stop the holy man from beating the kids black and blue with a strap for mild infractions. To all intents and purposes, misbehaving in Ireland was not a good idea, lest you end up in one of these religious hellholes. (See also: The Magdalene Sisters).Like the mad priest's belt, it certainly leaves an impact as you see these youngsters come out of their shells and start to make progress away from a restricted regime, but the formula which has been done to death as mentioned and this particular movie doesn't really add much more to the table. Even the 'surprise' tragedy can be predicted long before the end. Still, it does have a fair few moving moments, and the suffering these youths endure show that no matter how hard my life was at boarding school, it certainly doesn't compare to this cruelty... 6/10

Yesterday we saw this brilliant movie on a Spanish TV channel with the original sound-track and subtitles as a possibility we used as Irish is a quite difficult form of English. The Spanish Civil War did not only cause an almost 40 year dictatorship of Franco but also an agreement with the Vatican. The results of this type of agreement ('Concordat') could be seen in this film. A human being like the Prefecto Brother John would - in normal circumstances - be judged as a straightforward criminal. The soft way in which Liam Mercier tried to learn a bit from his teacher what 'love' means belongs to the best parts of this film.The strong and dangerous hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church - based on the Hitlerian 'Befehl ist Befehl' - has seldom been shown so clearly as in this masterpiece movie. The best teacher fought in the Spanish Civil War and did not hesitate to call the cruel murdering of Liam Mercier as a crime and nothing else. When he decided to leave this 'Reformatorio', his own pupils stopped him from doing it in a way he had taught them to love good poetry. Het only got real help from the director of the school, an honest man who had to live under horrible circumstances and had already stopped the layman-teacher once. 'We need you here' were his words.I passed with my Spanish/Catalan wife an eye-opening evening and have learned more than in any film about the danger of Catholic dualism.The movie deserves a 10 and I hope many people are going to see the movie. Then they will also notice the cleverly hidden discrimination that lives in the Roman Catholic way of what is called faith.

A superb movie. Well acted by the whole cast. Based in a Irish young offenders institution at the start of the second world war, though this is only mentioned inpassing. It's horrrific to think that it is based on a true story - thank god we have moved into a more civilizes way of dealing with young offenders. Being a 'true' story the bad guys don't actually seem to get the sort of punishment (one is a child abuser, the other is a sadist)that a fictional film would give them. Similar in style and story feel to 'Sleepers'.Not for the faint hearted - like 'Sleepers' the sexual abuse is not filmed and totally left to the viewers imagination which in many ways is worse. The violence is appropriate but not overly graphic. Similar sort of happy ending but with a sting in the tail. Well worth watching. Highly recommended.

Another Roman-Catholic bashing film that comes hot on the heels of The Magdalene Sisters and in a very similar tone. Young adolescent boys that have got into trouble are incarcerated in a 1930s Irish Reformatory School. There they receive fascist style floggings and rape at the hands of the priests. All based on a true story and quite horrific to watch - one scene of two boys being flogged almost to death is remarkably similar to the same scene in Passion of Christ where 'Jesus' is tortured before crucifixion. Whether the film makes any significant contribution is another matter. Even in an age when courts worldwide seem embattled over paedophile Roman Catholic priests, most people are now aware of the moral paucity of that religious order without ever questioning it. Forgiveness is handed out like a rosary, pointing to the good works the church does. Even a Michael Moore might have gone a little bit further and made some comment on what has been done to prevent similar abuses in the present day and the future, or raised awareness about other catastrophes waiting to happen. Or perhaps list in the closing credits some statistics, good and bad. Even Capturing the Friedmans puts forward a real moral dilemma inasmuch as the perpetrators of abuse are also people who have done much good. Song for a Raggy Boy does none of this and so, together with the rather cheesy clichés about the 'good teacher' standing up to the evil of the Roman Catholic Church, perhaps suggests to a sated audience that the horrors portrayed might be inspired by gratuitous or commercial interest rather than documentarian passion and the fight for human rights / goodness. The simplistic approach undermines what could have been a powerful statement. Failure to distinguish and contrast the Church hierarchy, its dominance, false sanctity and the way its main players are protected, on the one hand, with the decency of the many ordinary catholics on the other, may not only rob the film of its true potential but cause people to feel embittered at being lumped together in the same religion. That the Roman Catholic Church has been capable of so much evil through its history should not cause us to hate the millions of people born into that religion, just as we should not associate modern fundamentalist Islam (and its terrorist offspring) with the millions of loving Muslims. A fleeting reference to Catholic atrocity in the Spanish Civil War is again portrayed in black and white terms, without hard historical facts that could have been appended, or any context - leaving the viewer to either be aware of the politics and religious links to fascism or dismiss them as over-embroidery. Ultimately, films such as Raggy Boy need to go more accurately to the root of the psychological dynamics that allow such evil to flourish.