THE Catholic Church has come in for its fair share of criticism in recent times, and The Magdalene Sisters (15, 119mins) will not do it any favours.

The film tells the story of the notorious Magdalene Asylums in Ireland, which were run as laundries by nuns on behalf of the church and were supposed to reclaim the souls of "sinful" young women.

The asylums were little more than prisons, with the inmates generally innocent of their so-called crimes.

Peter Mullan's shattering, harrowing film is set in 1964 and focuses on three young women incarcerated at one laundry, run by the tyrranical Sister Bridget (McEwan).

There is Margaret (Duff), who has been sent away by her family after she was raped by her cousin. There is Rose (Duffy), who has given birth out of wedlock. And there is Bernadette (Noone), a flirtatious teenager who seems to have been sent from her orphanage as a pre-emptive strike, before temptation gets the better of her.

What the girls endure is a brutal, often sadistic regime and it often makes painful viewing. The scene in which two nuns mock and laugh at a group of girls as they make them run on the spot in the nude is distressing and difficult to watch.

But this is a film that must be seen. It's a valuable lesson in human rights and quite remarkable that so little was known and done about these places the last Magdalene laundry only closed in 1996.

The film is also superbly acted by a cast of largely inexperienced actresses and Noone, in her first acting assignment, is quite outstanding.

Rating: 8 out of 10