Angela's Ashes

Angela's Ashes (1999) is a drama directed by Alan Parker that you can watch online on iFILM, starring Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle. It adapts Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir — the story of a large Irish family that sailed back from New York to Limerick in 1935, broke and unwelcome, trading one kind of misery for another.

The father, Malachy, is a charming man who drinks every wage packet before it reaches the house. The mother, Angela, holds everything together through sheer stubbornness: leaking walls, no heat, children going hungry. Young Frankie watches it all and files it away. The film moves through his childhood in episodes — a brother's death, a first communion, odd jobs, small rebellions — narrated by the adult Frankie with wry distance rather than self-pity.

Parker shoots the grey Limerick lanes and flooded ground floors with a restraint that keeps the film from tipping into misery tourism. Watson carries the emotional weight without a single scene of theatrical breakdown. It is hard to watch at times, but the sharpness of McCourt's eye, and Watson's quiet ferocity, make it worth it. Stream Angela's Ashes online on iFILM.