Verdict: Definitely one-sided, but still very powerful.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Call it “Cool Hand Luke” with wimples or “The Great Escape” in a convent.

Peter Mullan's excellent new film, “The Magdalene Sisters,” is a harsh, inflammatory look at the Magdalene Asylums, convents sponsored and managed by the Catholic Church in Ireland. Forced-labor camps for “wayward” young women — the girls did other people's wash to wash away their own sins — the laundries were common into the '70s (the last one closed in 1996).

Mullan, who also plays a small part as a convent girl's bad-tempered dad, takes us back to early-'60s Dublin. There we meet three young women — sinful temptresses in the eyes of the Church — who are inducted into a Magdalene asylum on the same day.

Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) was raped by her cousin at a family wedding. She's courageous enough to tell her parents. The upshot? The boy goes unpunished and she's shipped off to the laundries, as the family priest advises. Rose (Dorothy Duffy) has had a baby out of wedlock. Again, it takes two to couple, but only one is punished. Bernadette's (Nora-Jane Noone) sin is that she's pretty and boys flirt with her. And she flirts back. Best lock her up.

Their new home is presided over by Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan), a woman with a curdled twinkle in her eye and a manner that makes Nurse Ratched look like Mother Teresa. Mullan also introduces us to another unwed mother, the slow-witted Crispina (Eileen Walsh), who is routinely used as a sexual convenience by one of the priests.

The convent is run like a prison. The wardens — I mean, nuns — sit separately from their charges at meals and eat real food instead of glorified gruel. And there are lifers — discarded women, widows or spinsters mostly, who have no place to go in the outside world.

In the picture's most chilling scene, several nuns insist the naked girls line up in front of them. Like the cruelest sorority hazing imaginable, they hold a jokey little “contest” as to who has the smallest breasts or the most pubic hair.

The most telling moment, however, is when “The Bells of St. Mary's” is screened for the girls as a Christmas treat. Sister Bridget's rhapsodic identification with Ingrid Bergman's saintly nun is so loony it verges on the tragic.

The characters are fictional, but their stories are based on a composite of actual events. Mullan's outrage sears the screen. There's nothing subtle, respectful or delicately put here. Incendiary and one-sided, the film is a firebomb thrown at the part of the church that allowed these abuses to go on for decades.

The Vatican condemned the movie after it won top prize at the Venice International Film Festival, and distributor Miramax has been trying to stir up more controversy to get the picture more press. “The Magdalene Sisters” doesn't need that kind of help.

The acting is wonderful, especially McEwan. The tone, while thoroughly and unabashedly biased, gives the film a righteous sense of purpose. And Mullan, for all his anger, mixes things up. What happens to these girls is ugly, but there are also some very funny bits — like Margaret's revenge on Crispina's lecherous priest.

Faith is the bedrock of any religion. Unfortunately, there's also such a thing as misplaced faith, which leads to suicide bombers and burning crosses. And to institutions in which those who are supposed to be taking care of the flock act, instead, like wolves among lambs.