Jimmy's Hall

Jimmy's Hall (2014) is Ken Loach's Irish period drama — watch it online on iFILM. Barry Ward plays Jimmy Gralton, who returns from New York to rural Ireland in 1932 and reopens the community hall he'd built a decade earlier. The place draws in young people for jazz nights, poetry readings, and boxing lessons.

That's enough to make enemies. The local priest, played by Jim Norton, sees the hall as a rival for his congregation's loyalty. Landowners read it as political agitation. Andrew Scott appears as a younger clergyman pulled between sympathy and obedience. The opposition organizes, and Jimmy soon finds himself fighting not for his hall but for the right to stay in the country.

Gralton was a real man — the only Irish citizen ever deported from the Irish Free State on political grounds. Loach brought the film to the main competition at Cannes in 2014, his third film rooted in Irish history. It's a quiet, unhurried movie, and the restraint makes the ending land harder. Stream Jimmy's Hall (2014) online on iFILM.