Katie
 (12A) Why does the woman who put Irish boxing on the international map receive relatively little attention from the media? Is it because she doesn’t disgrace herself enough in public like Conor McGregor? Or, more ominously, because she tends to mention the dreaded ‘G’ word, i.e. God – society’s latest taboo  – in interviews? Imagine…

First
Man
(PG) I’ll never forget the night in 1969 when I sat transfixed in front of a television set watching Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon. I ran outside the house to look up at the Moon itself, marvelling at the fact that it was the same as the one on the television. Now there was…

Pope
 John
 Paul 
II 
in 
Ireland: 
A
 Plea 
for 
Peace 
(12A)   Did the 1979 visit of Pope John Paul II to our shores eventually impact on the Good Friday Agreement that saw “the force of argument”, as this fascinating documentary puts it, replacing “the argument of force”? Or as Seamus Heaney said, helped “hope and history rhyme”? It frames his visit in the context…

The 
Wife 
(15A)   Glenn Close has been labouring away in the Hollywood vineyard for many moons now without too much to show for it. She’s been a bridesmaid at the annual Oscar ceremonies so often, ‘Close’ isn’t just her surname – it’s more like a career description. Some poor editorial decisions haven’t helped. In Fatal Attraction,…

Black 
47
 (15A)   Rambo meets Fionn Mac Cumhaill in this mesmerising drama from Lance Daly. I don’t think we’ve ever had a Celtic action hero before unless we count Braveheart. There’s an almost super-human one in this highly unusual film. It starts out as a kind of post-colonial history lesson about the horrors of the famine…

The
 Children 
Act
 (12A) The penultimate scene of this moving (if occasionally sugar-coated) study of lives lived to the full, lives thrown away and those gone stale, is heavily reminiscent of the last one in John Huston’s magisterial The Dead. In that film, Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) has to listen to his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston) telling him…

Pope 
Francis:
 A
 Man 
of
 his
 Word
 (PG)   St Francis of Assisi travelled to the Holy Land 800 years ago to try and end a war. Today his successor is continuing that journey. Pope Francis – ‘Papa Francesco!’ to the crowds who swarm around him in his native Argentina – has made it his mission to continue the work of his…

The 
Image 
You 
Missed
 (PG)   The idea was good: dovetail the idea of a fractured fraternal relationship with a fractured country. Unfortunately, this Donal Foreman feature, which tenuously examines his relationship with his father, the late American documentarian Arthur MacCaig, against the backdrop of the Troubles, is far too skimpy and staccato to justify the tantalising potential of…

L’Apparition   Vincent Lindon is one of my favourite French actors. He’s always reminded me of Miley from Glenroe. In a country where we expect to find more clean-cut heroes, he has more the look of a character actor than a leading man with his lived-in face. You feel he’s been out digging fields all…

The
 Secret
 of
 Marrowbone
 (15A)   There’s a scene in this where a girl puts her hand into a hole in the ceiling with a morsel of food to feed a skunk that’s living in her attic. When she does so, a human hand fondles her. I don’t know about you, but if that happened to me I’d be…