Brendon Gleeson in The Guard

Sergeant Gerry Boyle is a small-town Irish cop with a confrontational personality, a subversive sense of humour, a dying mother, a fondness for prostitutes and absolutely no interest whatsoever in the international drug-smuggling ring that has brought FBI agent Wendell Everett to his door.

Boyle drifts through life, not much concerned about anything, not even the mysterious murder of a man in one of the town’s holiday cottages. But when Everett shows Boyle the mugshots of four drug traffickers, he recognises one of them as the dead man. And so the two cases converge, with a bemused Everett finding himself adrift in the decidedly original and sometimes surreal world of Sergeant Gerry Boyle, the last of the independents!