In the mid- to late-1990s, Irish Cinema underwent a radical shift, which entailed, among other significant features, a thematic trajectory from the rural to the urban, from the historical to the contemporary and from the local to the universal. This shift also involved a radical reconfiguration of cinematic masculinities, not only in relation to the representation of male characters but also in terms of how masculinity as discourse was being addressed. The earlier critiques of traditional patriarchal masculinity, which emerged from a more politically-engaged and less commercial period in Irish filmmaking, began to give way to more ambiguous, male-centered narratives, whose protagonists resist unequivocal ideological categorisation. What is most striking about this new cycle of male-themed and male-oriented films is their preoccupation with underclass, criminal and socially-marginalised masculinities at the height of the Celtic Tiger, a time of unprecedented economic prosperity in Ireland. Although Ireland’s increased prosperity has also brought forth a number of urban, middle-class films featuring new, gay and reconstructed men {About Adam, Goldfish Memory and When Brendan Met Trudy), the enduring centrality and popularity over the past decade of ‘indigenised’ versions of a number of male-oriented (sub)genres from elsewhere merits particular attention. This thesis explores the changing discursive constructions of masculinity which characterise this strand of contemporary Irish filmmaking and the varying meanings and pleasures which they offer to different subsections of the male audience.