Full transparency: This somewhat formulaic Hilary Swank headliner isn’t going to win over critics with its overly saccharine narrative (hopeless romantics need only apply here). But how the film whisks its audience away on virtual trip through some of the most beautiful parts of the Emerald Isle is something to behold. About a woman whose posthumous pen palling with her husband takes her from New York City to Ireland to start a new life, it’s lighter fare to lift the mood Irish cinema can often stay brooding in.

At the heart of The Commitments is a rock band from a poor nook of North Dublin on a mission to bring soul music to Ireland. It’s a peculiar goal, for sure, but it’s one that makes for a rollicking fun watch. As charming as it is vulgar, the Alan Parker-directed concert film-slash-comedy is also a joyful introduction to Irish folk rocker Glen Hansard, who you may know either from his real-life Swell Season duo group or from sharing the screen with Czech singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová in the John Carney winner Once.

This Boston-based crime thriller belongs to its two Irish Catholic vigilante killers (Sean Patrick Flannery and Norman Reedus) in search of truth (veritas) and justice (aequitas)—or so their matching tattoos imply. Sure, it’s not the best-made film and, sure, it doesn’t have the tightest of scripts, but Troy Duffy’s mafia-offing mania is pure entertainment.

You can’t have an Irish-inspired film roundup without including Irish Brit legend Daniel Day-Lewis. You could go with The Boxer or My Left Foot to get your Paddy’s Day off on the right foot, but we’d go with Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father, a historical courtroom drama charting the aftermath of a coerced confession to an IRA bombing. Powerful stuff.

Please excuse Tom Cruise’s first attempt at voicing a foreign accent as Joseph Donnelly, the Irish Catholic farm boy opposite Nicole Kidman’s Protestant priss in Ron Howard’s epic adventure drama about a pair of dreamers who hope to be landowners one day. So what if his technique is nowhere near Daniel Day Lewis-level mastery? We really just like his hat. And his suit.