You come away from the movie not just convinced but cowed.

| Nov 21, 2022

This drama about a shocking reality from recent history balances a light touch with searing intensity and a sense of moral outrage.

| Mar 11, 2008

Grimly believable.

| Mar 11, 2008

A deliberately provocative film that triggers the audience's emotions in order to highlight important issues of personal freedom. Amen to that.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 30, 2006

You may never look at a nun the same way again.

| Feb 9, 2006

A grim and unmistakable masterpiece of bleak, black sorrow.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 1, 2003

The Magdalene Sisters has the force of an alarm being sounded.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 5, 2003

Why was this film made after the homes had already been abolished? One reason, hardly trifling, is that it was made excellently. Thematically, however, it stings.

Full Review | Sep 3, 2003

Will make you furious and dejected, but in the end it offers an optimistic if unsettling twist.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 28, 2003

It is a strong, affecting movie about man's ability to twist holiness into horror.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Aug 22, 2003

A story like this one could easily succumb to outraged melodrama, but not only does Mullan keep the drama human-sized, he even leavens it with the humor that one can easily believe had to be summoned to endure such misguided and malicious treatment.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 22, 2003

Full of forceful, aching performances.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 22, 2003

Although it's heavy-handed in its emotional button-pushing, The Magdalene Sisters still manages to produce all the reactions the filmmakers want: repulsion, indignation, anger and outrage.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 21, 2003

Mr. Mullan's fictional treatment of this subject in The Magdalene Sisters has much to commend.

| Aug 21, 2003

Whatever value the film might have had as an exposé of social sin is undermined by its prejudicial stereotyping of every single nun and priest. Instead of a morally serious film about a corrupt institution… it becomes mere agitprop.

| Original Score: D | Aug 18, 2003

Definitely one-sided, but still very powerful.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Aug 17, 2003

There's been no sex, no unwanted children, just the allure of the possibility of carnal actions and for that she's been sent to work her life away in an inhuman institution.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 17, 2003

Watching the film, you can feel years of real pain. It feels more like gothic documentary than darkly limned fancy.

Full Review | Aug 15, 2003

A stirring, emotionally galvanizing film, not only due to its shattering subject matter but thanks to Mullan's spot-on eye for casting and fluid, uncoercive style.

Full Review | Aug 15, 2003

The cast is uniformly fine, particularly smiley-eyed Geraldine McEwan as the avaricious Sister Bridget, and the filmmaking haunting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 15, 2003