The General

“The extraordinary true story of the rise and fall of the gangster, Martin Cahill.”

Martin Cahill (Brendan Gleeson) is a Dublin crook who runs his gang from a council house and a snooker table, and half the neighbourhood treats him as a folk hero. John Boorman follows his robberies through the early 1980s, which draw the notice of the police, the I.R.A., the U.V.F., and eventually men on his own team. Shot in grainy black and white, Dublin looks cold and damp, and Cahill keeps his hat down and his face turned from the cameras.