List Price: $19.99You Pay Only: $15.49 You Save: $4.50 (23%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
Brand: Unknown
EAN: 0786936233094
Format: Anamorphic, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
Label: Miramax Home Entertainment
Manufacturer: Miramax Home Entertainment
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Miramax Home Entertainment
Region Code: 1
Release Date: March 23, 2004
Running Time: 120 minutes
Sales Rank: 16367
Studio: Miramax Home Entertainment
Theatrical Release Date: 2002
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Editorial Review:
Description:
A stirring, must-see motion picture critics called one of the best films of the year, THE MAGDALENE SISTERS is the triumphant story of three extraordinary women whose courage to defy a century of injustice would inspire a nation! Abandoned by society and cast out by their families for crimes they did not commit, these women found themselves stripped of their liberty and dignity and condemned to indefinite sentences of manual labor. Within the church-run Magdalene Laundries, these women were forced into unbearable institutional servitude in order to cleanse themselves of the 'sins' of which they had been accused. From acclaimed director Peter Mullan, this award-winning powerhouse not only reveals the truth behind one of the great tragedies of our time, but celebrates the bravery that would bring it to an end!
Amazon.com:
A movie guaranteed to make the blood boil, The Magdalene Sisters gives a lacerating account of life inside a Magdalene Laundry, one of the dismal asylums for 'wayward women' run by the Catholic Church in Ireland. Director Peter Mullan, inspired by a TV documentary on the same subject, follows the miserable fates of three young women who are institutionalized in the 1960s for flimsy reasons; their lives are at the mercy of sadistic nuns (Geraldine McEwan is superb as the head of the place). The film sounds tortuous, but its rich sense of outrage and excellent performances--Nora-Jane Noone is a real discovery--make it consistently gripping. The movie won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and went on to become a box-office hit in Ireland, where the Magdalene system was still a fresh memory. It had been abolished only in 1996. --Robert Horton
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Challenging to watch
The film makes no pretense that it will be easy to watch. It starts with a girl raped at a nice folksy community party and instead of the boy being strung up by the older men, their attention is on the fact that the girl has been soiled. The dirtied girl is shipped off to be incarcerated by nuns who exploit girls in their laundry business who are even suspected of having the potential to be vulnerable to sex out of marriage.
From there it has the flavor of a documentary -- with scene after scene of abuse by cold-hearted nuns who rationalize their meanness by imagining that they are doing God's work. They don't come across as phonies but as people who have no intellectual tools for understanding their own minds and feelings outside of their religious/moralistic and institutional framework.
The things that people will do when they believe that they are absolutely right can be just inhuman.
In this sense there is a universal message to the film. Religions are great places for screwed up people to hide, and to screw up other people's heads, who then give them moral support. So here in the film we have conservative Catholics, but elsewhere we have Taliban and other fundamentalist Muslims, fundamentalist Mormons, and various conservative Protestant groups here and there. Granted these are the extremes, but extremes tell us a lot about the human condition and slippery slopes.
Most of the film is about cruel nuns -- a notorious topic of discussion not ... Read More
Rating:  - Shocking and Truthful
This movie is a realistic look at the abuse of girls and women by Roman Catholic priest and nuns in "homes for wayward girls" in Ireland. These "homes" were basically white slavery, revenue producers and baby mills for the Roman Catholic church (RCC). No one after seeing this movie could deny that the abuse in the RCC is localized to a few bad apples in the RCC. With over 50,000 girls going through this horrible experience it is no wonder that people are leaving RCC is losing members.
The movie is well made "docudrama" with good production quality. Although it is shocking to see, it is nonetheless very truthful. If you do not have a strong stomach, this is not the movie for you.
While the characters are composites of the thousands of girls that passed through theses homes. The interviews on the "extra section" with the women who experienced these horrors is especially moving.
I would recommend this movie as an expose of the abuse that happens when a nation lets the RCC have its way. After these abuses were made known, it caused the collapse of the government resulting in elections and reforms.
Rating:  - Good
Brutally psychopathic lesbian nuns and lascivious pedophile priests. What else is new? No, seriously, watching the DVD of The Magdalene Sisters was like a time machine for me. Not that I was ever an unwed mother in an Irish hellhole run by religious extremists, but I did grow up in a poor neighborhood that was patrolled by reprobate and psychotic cops that made the bad cops in Serpico look virginal, by comparison. Those cops, as the nuns in the film, ruled by terror and brutality. People were assaulted and humiliated and denigrated for the least of reasons.
This film could have easily veered off track into a running anti-Catholic joke or screed, but its artistic `reality' is too levelheaded to allow that. Basically, last century in Ireland was a misogynist's utopia. Young women were horded off to laundries to do slave labor for the Roman Catholic church, under the guidance of nuns from the Magdalene sisterhood, whose hope was to redeem prostitutes, unwed mothers, and other `fallen girls'. The title is a play off this fact and three young women who are the stars of the film. Based upon real women, although for dramatic purposes their tales are condensed into the 1960s (the DVD's documentary Sex In A Cold Climate shows the women the lead characters were based on, and their age range varies over a quarter of a century). Why the 1960s and not the 1940s seems only to be for the belief among many artists that this was the last period of social justice in the world. The three girls represent different ... Read More
Rating: - This film made me mad
I felt disgusted watching this film, yet was unable to turn it off. I was utterly amazed that these atrocities actually occured and very recently at that. This is a very serious movie about a serious subject matter. The actresses do an amazing job of portraying the victimized and imprisoned girls who get tortured in practically every way you can think of. The woman who plays the main nun is shockingly good and really makes you believe that there are true terrors in this world. Everyone should see this film, if only to learn something that I was only recently made aware of.
Rating: - Shameful Chapter in Irish CHurch History
Three girls are sent separately to an institution run by nuns in 1960s Ireland to be reformed for sexual misbehavior.The opening sequences show each girl's individual circumstances and the incredibly unfair judgement in all three cases.
Once there they are subjected to a life of servitude and discipline that is rendered in the film as unbearably horrible. The girls adapt to their surroundings to a degree and the film becomes the story of how they struggle to retain some sense of independence and dignity in the repressive surroundings ruled over by a group of insensitive and sadistic nuns.
The Magdalene laundry's that were run as a sort of a reformatory system for wayward girls was an aspect of Irish Catholic history that was not well known to me and it is revealed in this story as a seriously abusive and embarrassing chapter in the history of the Church in Ireland.
The film is tightly put together with barely a wasted scene and the acting is superb. From the opening wedding sequence you have the sense that this will be different and the film does not disappoint. Nora Jane Noone's performance stands out but the entire cast is very good.
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