Shadow Dancer, about an IRA partisan recruited as an informant by MI5, creates a powerful mood of unease and sustains it for an hour and forty minutes. There are scattered moments of intense beauty throughout, thanks to Rob Hardy s widescreen photography, which tends to view people from either very far away or very close up, making you think about them as individuals and then as specks in a social panorama.
And yet for all its beauty and intelligence, the movie is unsatisfying. Why? The story of, essentially a civil Cold War between Irish and British forces is so innately powerful that we should feel for the characters a great deal more than we do.