Angela's Ashes

In the mid-1930s, an Irish family leaves New York for Limerick after the death of an infant daughter. The father, an unemployed veteran, cannot find steady work, and what money comes in is spent on drink, leaving his wife to hold the household together through charity and whatever she can scrape by on. Their sons grow up in cramped, damp rooms, and the eldest, Frank, watches his mother wear herself down while his father drifts away.

Alan Parker directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Laura Jones, adapting Frank McCourt's autobiographical book. It was Parker's eleventh feature, following Evita in 1996. Emily Watson plays Angela and Robert Carlyle plays Malachy, with three actors — Joe Breen, Ciarán Owens and Michael Legge — playing Frank at different ages. The large credited cast reflects the wide social world of the story.

The film was a commercial disappointment: made for about 50 million dollars, it returned roughly 13 million worldwide. Audiences have been kinder to it than critics, rating it 7.3 out of 10 on TMDB, while the critics' score stands at 5.8 out of 10 from 85 reviews. That gap suggests a film that many viewers connected with personally even as reviewers judged it more coolly.