The Playboys (1992)

Critic Reviews

• Variety Staff, Variety

  This familiar pattern of headstrong girl and passions brimming beneath the surface is well directed by first time Scottish helmer Gillies MacKinnon, though the pace slows in middle reels as plot gives way to the troupe's enjoyable stage performances.

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

  It seems like everyone had a ball; I know I did.

• Jeff Menell, Hollywood Reporter

  This absorbing film boasts several outstanding performances as well as a richness in both story and character that is much too rare these days.

• Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

  There's magic in it.

• Janet Maslin, New York Times

  Mr. Finney, looking puffy and ravaged in the role of a man who has lost much of himself to drink (and whose obsessive interest in Tara somehow offers him the chance of redemption), brings a furious, buried intensity to Hegarty's longing.

• Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

  The movie seems determined to match our expectations, instead of challenging them.

• , Empire Magazine

  Not amazing but watchable.

• , Film4

  The wry Irish wit sits like froth on the head of a glass of Guinness, masking a deceptively bitter brew.

• Emanuel Levy, EmanuelLevy.Com

  The film is set in 1957, before TV and cars became popular, thus explaining the centrality of two institutions in the Irish village: the church and the theater.

• Geoff Andrew, Time Out

  With time, place and mood sensitively evoked, this is solid, intelligent entertainment, mercifully free of the usual 'Oirish' clichés.

• Jeffrey M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid

  This bit of blarney depicts a sweet, silly love triangle in 1950s provincial Ireland.

• Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice

  Rfeveals the delights and the drawbacks of small town life.

Read all 12 critic reviews