The third of Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy, The Van centres on Bimbo, a laid-off bakery worker in Barrytown who enlists his old friend Larry into a fast-food business run from a reconstructed chip van. Backdropped by the Irish team’s World Cup efforts of 1990, this is the familiar Doyle territory of tragi-comic striving against the odds, of men trapped in the twilight zone of unemployment and familial squabbles.

Dir. Stephen Frears
UK, 1996
Colour
Dolby SR
100mins.