Cowboys and Angels
Alfredo: You have to go away for a long time, many years, before you can come back and find your people. The land where you were born….
Salvatore (Totò): Who said that? Gary Cooper? James Stewart? Henry Fonda? Eh?
Alfredo: No, Totò. Nobody said it. This time it’s all me. Life isn’t like in the movies. Life is much harder.
- Cinema Paradiso (1988)
David Gleeson, the writer/director of Once Upon a Time in a Cinema, comes from a family of cinema entrepreneurs. His grandfather owned several harness shops in the small town of Cappamore in County Limerick. He bought a cinema there in the 1940s. The Regal opened in 1942, closing only a half-century later in 1991. It began with Abbott and Costello in the Navy (1941), curious given the nominal neutrality of The Emergency (1939-1945); its final film was Green Card (1990). But soon after the cinema was purchased, Gleeson’s father Eddie was given responsibility for managing it. He was twelve. Eddie Gleeson later opened additional cinemas in Kilmallock, County Limerick (1970), and in Nenagh, County Tipperary (1986). He only retired in 2002.
Not surprisingly, David Gleeson spent much of his youth travelling back-and-forth across County Limerick, working in the family business. In an interview with Film Ireland, he described this as a magical experience and useful preparation for his future career. As a young man in Limerick City, he begin to write for the theatre. He took a rough bedsit across from the then-shuddered Royal Cinema. The site has a history, now over a century, with moving pictures. It opened as the Royal in 1947 and closed in 1985, dates very similar to those of Gleeson’s film. Its final movie was Police Academy 2 (1985). The building continued as a venue into the late 1990s. The Cranberries were regulars. It also appears to be where Father Ted and Father Doughal sang ‘My Lovely Horse’ in Father Ted (1995-1998). It was renovated for Once Upon a Time in a Cinema and shot there in late 2024. It may become a cinema and culture hub
After a variety of jobs in Ireland, the North Sea, and the Arctic, Gleeson took an intensive film course in New York. He met his wife, Nathalie Lichtenthaeler, there. Shortly afterwards, he wrote and later directed Cowboys and Angels (2003), set in Limerick, about a young fella from the County. Lichtenthaeler produced. Since then, the two have worked in the film industry in the States, where they live with their four children. But Gleeson had long wanted to make a film set in or around cinema, conscious that Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988) occupied the field (it gets an oblique reference in his new film). His determination to write and direct what became Once Upon a Time in a Cinema finally fell into place in Los Angeles, as he listened to a Quentin Tarantino podcast. Like young Totò in Cinema Paradiso, Gleeson was weaned on cinema and left home to find himself. Like Salvatore, the elder Totò, he returned to honour that legacy.
Back to the Future
Cocomero: The church has inspired cinema. A magical place with columns, marble, domes where people can gather with the promise of another life.
Jordan: Movies are a kind of great beyond.
Cocomero: And also equal to all. There are no damned. Pope Pius said that.
- Splendor (1989)
Once Upon a Time in a Cinema intersects with a number of films about Ireland in the early 1980s. Over the last decade, this includes Sing Street (2016), Out of Innocence (2019), Dannyboy (2020), An Cailín Ciuín (The Quiet Girl, 2022), Ann (2023), That They May Face the Rising Sun (2023), Small Things Like Things (2024), and Spilt Milk (2024). Margo Harkin’s Hush-a-Bye, Baby (1990), also set in 1984, is another essential picture of the period. These films represent a wide range of views on a difficult period: Northern violence, unemployment and emigration, church dominance and Marian apparitions, political instability and constitutional referenda, and a widening drug epidemic. The history of the decade, authentic or otherwise, will be implicit for many viewers, background information that ensures that Once Upon a Time in a Cinema isn’t a lightweight exercise in nostalgia.
Cinemas have played important narrative roles in some Irish films of the past. In Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (1970), Gene Wilder played – wait for it – a Dublin dung man, scooping up after the horses that remained in the city at the time. He falls for an American, played by Canadian Margo Kidder. He’s left standing in front of the Ambassador on Parnell Street when she fails to show for a date. In Into the West (1992), Portarlington’s now decrepit Savoy was a refuge for two young boys, who watched Back to the Future Part III (1990). With another horse. And the cinema features very prominently in Mickybo & Me (2004), where two young Belfast boys, one catholic and one protestant, bond over Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). As in Into the West, they run off on an adventure, sometimes with horses, with their parents and a posse in pursuit.
Perhaps no Irish film focuses on a cinema as much as Once Upon a Time in a Cinema. A distant second is Thaddeus O’Sullivan’sStella Days (2012). That film’s script was inspired by Michael Doorley’s memoir Stella Days: The Life and Times of a Rural Irish Cinema 1957-1967 (2011). It’s set in small-town Borrisokane, County Tipperary, in the mid-1950s. In both book and film, the cinema represents outside narratives and norms, made possible by the electrification of the country, that might threaten Irish culture and community. And the church. A similar argument, about the ‘Los Angelization’ of Irish culture through the dance halls a generation earlier, was reflected in Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall (2014). But in Stella Days, the bishop wants to erect grand new churches; Father Barry (Martin Sheen) wants a cinema. Sheen’s mother had emigrated from Borrisokane.
In Once Upon a Time in a Cinema, there’s not a priest or a bishop in sight. Still, the cinema is a kind of secular church, a place of communion. And where cinemas appeared to threaten the community, here it’s the cinema itself that’s under threat by the market and the vulgar capitalism of the 1980s. This view is represented in the person of Harry Conway (Stanley Townsend), a slippery businessman and politician, who wants to buy the cinema on the cheap, for his own purposes. Set in an unnamed Irish small town in 1984, you can just make out the Royal sign in a scene or two. The Royal, we’re told, has been in operation since 1944, not unlike Cappamore’s Regal. But its role in the community is challenged by the ubiquity of home video, similar to the contemporary challenge of streaming.
Once Upon a Time in a Cinema may be closer in spirit to Eugene O’Brien’s Savoy (2004). The play is set on that cinema’s closing night, after 45 years, in Edenberry, County Offaly, in 1994/5 (the text lists both dates). In the introductory notes to the play, entitled ‘Cinema Purgatorio’, poet and playwright Vincent Woods writes about small-town cinema, “a place where myth, fantasy, and colour whirled out of the darkness and reigned for a brief time. Where lust was allowed or possible or imaginable. Where you could escape for a while – if not under a skirt, then into the light of other places, other times, meeting characters who might be you or a little of what you might be. A healthy alternative to church and pub. Cheaper than drink, freer than enforced worship.”
Again, many of these elements were the very things that made cinemas threatening to small-town Ireland and that, for many, appeared to justify a long history of film censorship. In Savoy, the cinema can’t compete against video and multiplex chains. Its closure was traumatic, at least for those who worked at the cinema: ‘Ye’d swear that someone had died.’ And adding insult to injury, its final film was Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994).
Breathless
Harry: Ahh, you’ve seen too many films.
Earl: And you haven’t seen enough.
- Once Upon a Time in a Cinema (2026)
In Once Upon a Time in a Cinema, Earl Clancy (an excitable Colin Morgan) fights to keep the Royal, a legacy from his father, afloat in the face of its deterioration, rat infestation, and colourful customers, employees, and tradesmen. Earl’s often breathless, scrambling Basil Fawlty-like, fighting one battle after another. At one point, Earl and Harry Conway briefly discuss The Smallest Show on Earth (1957). That English film’s plot resembles Gleeson’s film. It revolves around the attempt to save a cinema from rivals who want to buy it to build a car park. But Earl’s trials are familial, too. His younger brother Gerald (Calam Lynch) believes that Earl’s ignored family responsibilities for the cinema. His wife’s gone. His relationship with his daughter Kate (Clara Crichton) is strained. Gerald sees himself as an entrepreneur and e presses his Earl to sell the cinema, with the hope of building an all mod cons petrol station at the edge of town.
Earl may be obsessive but he’s also romantic who believes in the magic of film. He knows things are changing. At the start of Once Upon a Time in a Cinema, he laments that ‘Business has changed. Everything’s changed. The town’s changed. There’s no sense of community anymore.’ He suggests, too, that buildings like the cinema preserve something of their past. Earl fears the loss, in the present, of the cinema as a space, like the dance halls, for collective engagement. Even Conway acknowledges the virtues of this shared experience, as well as his memories of the theatre that existed before the Royal. This sense of cinemas retaining the past was important to Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), about the closure of a Taiwanese cinema. And that film was the last shown before the closure of regular business at Galway’s Pálás Cinema just last year.
Viewers needn’t be cinephiles to enjoy Once Upon a Time in a Cinema. But it helps. An introductory sequence sets the scene, showing marquees announcing Footloose (1984) and Superman III (1983). As the film begins, the Flying Picketts’ a cappella cover of ‘Only You’, plays. A favourite of Earl’s, its opening lines refer to ‘a story of love’ as the moon and theatre lighting are shown, the camera rotating like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Earl and Gerald are discussing, quite theatrically, the cinema. It was always big for their small town, Earl says. Gerald replies, sarcastically, about ‘the glory days when cinema was big’. With a nod to Sunset Boulevard (1950), Earl says that ‘cinema’s still big, it’s the town that got small.’ There are some lovely cinephile touches, too: each on-screen change of a film reel is reflected in the flickering, scratchy images we see. And there are posters for Bullitt (1968), Christie (1983), Class of 1984 (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), Gorky Park (1983), Grease (1978), and Red Dawn (1984). When someone’s not pinching them.
The film being shown during Once Upon a Time in a Cinema is Breathless (1983), with Richard Gere and Valérie Kaprisky. A remake of the Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classic (1960), it finds Gere’s character – the wild Jesse – on the run from the cops. In a bit of movie magic, Gleeson’s film seems to correspond roughly, in real time, with Breathless. But this is reel time: Breathless is longer than Once Upon a Time in a Cinema. Attentive viewers will also discover that the former’s scenes are shifted around by Gleeson. But there are explicit parallels in action between the two films. And Breathless might be most important, too, for the identification of Gere’s character (Jesse) with the Silver Surfer, a superhero who saves Earth with the Fantastic Four (retold most recently in The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)) and then remains as the planet’s defender. Over the course of Once Upon a Time in a Cinema, Earl associates himself with the Silver Surfer in his defence of the Royal. The question is whether Earl ends up, more tragically, like Jesse.
Splendor
Once Upon a Time in a Cinema is obviously required viewing for fans of film. But it deserves, and would reward, a wide audience. It’s well-written and directed, with an entertaining story executed by an excellent cast. Gleeson’s film is also a respectable Irish contribution to movies that explore the community role and commercial challenges of cinemas: The Smallest Show on Earth, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, and A Useful Life (2010). If he was inspired by Cinema Paradiso, Once Upon a Time in a Cinema may be closer to Ettore Scola’s Splendor (1989). Both Italian films were released close together in time. Each focuses on cinema. Like Earl, Splendor’s Jordan (Marcello Mastroianni) is a struggling cinema owner/manager. The film makes its own Sunset Boulevard joke. And its ending is broadly – okay, very broadly – related to Once Upon a Time in a Cinema’s final scenes. For his part, Scola draws parallels between Jordan’s contributions to his town and George Bailey’s great gifts to Bedford Falls in It’s a Wonderful Life (1947). It would be easy to say something similar for Earl Clancy and his community. Or, in his own way, for David Gleeson and Limerick.
Once Upon a Time in a Cinema opened in cinemas on 1 May 2026.
About the Author
Seán Patrick Donlan is a law professor. He’s published on legal history, Irish history, and politics. His recent focus is on film, especially Irish cinema. He secretly hopes that, one day, he’ll be referred to as Dr Screen. He’s on LinkedIn and Letterboxd.