Beyond Keane's stick-it-up-your-bollocks, there isn't much else to Saipan

"All history is to some extent narrative. You cannot tell a story without in some way editing it, reducing it, compressing it. Which means that anybody telling a story about a historical event, particularly one from the relatively recent past, risks outraging those who have studied it or who remember it. Often those complaints are pedantic, trivial, but sometimes they are not. It's one thing to elide two minor characters or to tweak the timeline to simplify a story, quite another to imply misleading motivations."

"came out in Ireland on Boxing Day and will be released in the UK on 23 January. It is obsessed by detail: the tracksuits, the sweatshirts, the kits are all right. It's startling when the film cuts between reproductions of interviews and press conferences and actual footage to realise just how accurately these scenes have been recreated. Which raises two questions. What is the point?"

All history involves narrative editing, which compresses and reduces events and risks misrepresenting motivations. Storytellers of recent events can outrage those who studied or remember them; some complaints are pedantic, others substantive. Saipan, a film about Roy Keane's clash with Mick McCarthy before the 2002 World Cup, reproduces visual detail with startling accuracy. The film's costumes and recreated press conferences look authentic, yet the plotting contains grotesque inventions and motivational inaccuracies. The contrast between meticulous visual realism and dubious dramatization prompts questions about the film's purpose. Fra Filippo Lippi's realism, invoked via Browning, suggests painted depictions make viewers notice familiar things anew.

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