Set in Belfast in 1975, this vivid and tragic film revolves around young Loyalists at loose ends during a brief truce with their IRA enemies. They answer to a political éminence grise (Michael Gambon, a trenchcoated godfather) but in truth he can't control them. For a new generation, politics have been transformed into something personal indeed. In particular, Ian Hart's Ginger is a James Cagney for the times whose violence is driven by a crazy muse, Ma Barker become Mother Ireland. His edgy exteriority keeps us hugging our precious kneecaps, and we know the fear that was life in Troubled Belfast. The hapless partisan social clubs and the war councils in warehouses, the furtive sex under bridges and the streets like minefields, the next-door warrior and the suddenly dead-it is as far from Eire as can be imagined, but even the savvy young have a bleak nostalgia for something once better. (JB)