In her second collaboration with director Stephen Frears, Judi Dench gives one of the finest performances of her career in a moving true story.
Smarting from his being sacked by the Blair government, former journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan, brilliantly playing it straight) is told about an Irish woman forced to give up her child as a teenager in Ireland and who desperately wants to find him. Together, they travel there in search of any clues. Shining a light of the brutal treatment of young pregnant girls by the Church, the film’s anger at a barbaric system is offset by the warmth of the growing friendship between Sixsmith and Philomena, as she searches for her son.
