SOURCE: A review of Michael Collins, in The American Historical Review, Vol. 102, No. 1, February, 1997, pp. 248-49.

In the following review, Moran asserts that, "Michael Collins is a superior film that presents a legitimate interpretation of Collins's life and times."

In the various controversies that swirl around Irish history, a few historical figures serve as ideological touchstones. One's opinions about them reveal much about how one views the nature of Irish politics and questions about Irish identity. Along with Patrick Pearse and Eamonn De Valera, perhaps no person serves this role so well as Michael Collins, arguably the founder of the Irish Republican Army and the soldier who won an independent Irish state at the cost of partition, civil war, and his own life.

Michael Collins is Neil Jordan's attempt to tell the tale of Collins from his participation as a minor player in the Easter Rising of 1916 through...