Thoughts on 'The Wind That Shakes the Barley'?

It's my favorite film from 2006. A gripping and affecting war drama featuring some great performances from the whole cast. I think it totally deserved the Palme d'Or.

This is the classic example of a win for a name and career than for the actual film. 

It's fine at best, it's not as engaging as other Loach's films, as the movie comes to the last third becomes uneven, because at first it shows you how British behaved and how Irish behaved and and how their counterpart work as a goverment, and here is where the Loach touch makes an appereance and starts pointing fingers to everyone and while many times works very well ( his latest being one of them, or Route Irish from a few years ago ) here he goes to extremes in the way he portraits the Irish Reserve, all in the serve of cinematic agony, there's no big picture of "this is a soldier doing his job", he ignores that and portraits them as men without scruples. By the end of the film it's all misery and rage, an unpleasant, teasing, incendeary film. Which is a shame because the first hour even includes some light humour.