REVIEWED - MONDAYS IN THE SUN/LOS LUNAS AL SOL: The long-delayed Mondays in the Sun has its world premiere in September 2002 at the San Sebastian Film Festival, where it was voted best film by the jury. It was first seen here at the Dublin Film Festival in March 2003, and was chosen over Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her as the official Spanish entry for the Oscar ceremony in the same month.

Mondays in the Sun begins with a violent protest at the closure of a shipyard in the Galician town of Vigo, then picks up the story a few years later as a few former colleagues continue to rendezvous at the small bar bought by one of them with his redundancy money.

The men are buoyed by each other's company and by the repartee with which they vainly try to disguise their frustrated sense of impotence and the unspoken reality that landing another job is most unlikely. One man (José Ángel Egido) stubbornly persists in doing the job interview circuit, even dyeing his hair to make himself look younger, but always loses out to men less than half his age. The oldest of them (Celso Bugallo) keeps up the pretence that his wife will soon return from a very long holiday. Another (Luis Tosar) feels the stress in his marriage, being unemployed while his wife works nights at a fish-canning factory.

The fieriest of the men is Santa, a welder who dreams idly of a new life in Australia and resists developing meaningful relationships with the women in his life. Among the movie's fine cast, Javier Bardem is outstanding as Santa - and barely recognisable with the heavy beard and bulging paunch he grew to age himself for the role.

Bardem is a tower of quiet strength in this compassionate, deeply concerned social drama, directed with flair and integrity by Fernando León de Aranoa, who firmly eschews injecting it with any false hope or a tidy, upbeat resolution.