Lady Macbeth (18) People usually talk about Shakespeare’s ‘Big Four’ – Hamlet, Lear, Othello and Macbeth – as his pre-eminent works. I wouldn’t argue with that. If the first three have a fault it’s that few members of their casts can hold a candle to the main character. Not so with Macbeth. Lady Macbeth matches…

Fast and Furious 8 (12A) The two most popular types of books on the market these days, I’m told, are cook books and diet books. I’m thinking of writing one called Cook It But Don’t Eat It. That should corner both markets. Our society is beset with contradictions. Every night on TV – justifiably –…

Handsome Devil (15A) ‘The love that dare not speak its name,’ to quote Oscar Wilde’s famous phrase about homosexuality, has become very vocal in recent times. So much so that we’re almost in danger of replacing homophobia with heterophobia. I say this because most of the ‘nice’ people in this film from writer/director John Butler…

Going In Style (12A) What else can Hollywood do with the elderly? It’s made them into dolts. It’s made them into geniuses. It’s even, for goodness sake, put them into space (in Space Cowboys). Now, in a re-make of a 1979 movie, they’ve turned them into bank robbers. Enter Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan…

A Dark Song (16) Grieving mum seeks atonement for murdered sonMost horror films seem to populate their casts with masochists. They summon up demons to plague them. They run repeatedly into the face of danger. They seem geared towards inflicting the greatest amount of punishment on themselves for the least possible gain. Sophia Howard (Catherine…

Graduation (PG) You won’t see a better film about abortion than Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days. It should be used as a resource by anyone campaigning against the repeal of the Eighth Amendment. Now Cristian Mungiu is back with another equally absorbing moral parable. Again he uses the same lingering scenes to depict the…

The Secret Scripture (12A) This curious film, based on Sebastian Barry’s Booker Prize nominated novel, will confirm watchers in the view that over-arching anti-clericalism seems  increasingly prevalent in films today. Many of them seem to delight in shining a laser on Ireland’s dark past, especially in the treatment of vulnerable young women, especially vulnerable young…

The adorable Emma Watson proves there’s life after Harry Potter in Disney’s latest version of Beauty and the Beast.  This time the beast (Dan Stevens) can only  be freed from his wolf-like guise by the love of Watson, who’s distraught at being imprisoned in his enchanted castle until she begins to realise his heart is…

Logan (15) They say there are really only a half dozen plotlines. Everything else in film (and literature?) is an exemplification of these templates. Old wine, new bottles. And so it is here. For all the blood-spattering, when we get down to it this is really just another tale of crime and punishment, of righting…