The Cured (15A) If we draw a line from, say, King Kong to The Elephant Man, we can see a pattern. The mistreated ‘beasts’ become the victims of corporate forces trying to wipe them out. In such cases our sympathies lie foursquare behind such pariahs. The problem with The Cured, which focuses on a group of…
Michael Inside (15A) Prisons are places where small criminals become big ones. Such a transmogrification is demonstrated in graphic fashion in this tale of a meek 18-year-old from a North Dublin housing estate who’s given a two month sentence after being found with a stash of cocaine worth €2,000. Michael McCrea (Dafhyd Flynn) is a carrier…
Mary Magdalene (12A) Whatever we may say about the Biblical epics of yore, they exuded power. Even the run-of-the-mill (or should I say De Mille) ones. The problem with Garth Davis’ Mary Magdalene is that it tries so hard to be ‘authentic’ it sacrifices the iconic benchmarks of scripture to subdued sidebars. It’s a plodding film…
Unless (15A) What would make a normal young girl from a privileged home in Toronto drop out of college to live on the streets without telling anyone why? That’s the central conundrum surrounding this captivating moodpiece from Alan Gilsenan which begins – appropriately – with a song from Canada’s prime avatar of angst and alienation,…
The 90th anniversary of the Oscar ceremonies is being held this year in the Dolby Theatre, Los Angeles on March 4. Sadly, the possibility that home favourite Saoirse Ronan will reprise her Golden Globe victory for Lady Bird has been ruled out by the bookies. They make Frances McDormand the hot favourite for Three Billboards…
Black Panther (PG) Both directed and written by Ryan Googler, this is yet another highly entertaining offering from Marvel Studios. It concerns a king, T’challa (Chadwick Boseman) who returns to the technologically advanced fictional nation of Wakanda to be its leader. His path to power is threatened by a cadre of ne-er-do-wells but a consignment of…
Journey’s End (12A) They wait. They joke about soup. They snap off one another. Days pass. The spring offensive looms… We’re in France in March 1918, the last year of World War I. The ‘Boche’ still has some fight left in him and is about to descend on a group of British soldiers in a trench…
There’s a mouth-watering pairing of Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in Steven Spielberg’s The Post. The title refers to The Washington Post, the newspaper that brought down Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal. Set in 1971, this centres on a leaked government study of the Vietnam war which basically admitted it was unwinnable. Streep plays…
Molly’s Game (15) When Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) has a freak accident in the snow at an Olympic skiing event, she tries to build an alternative career as a cocktail waitress, a real estate agent and, finally, running high stakes poker games for VIPs. Aaron Sorkin trades heavily on Martin Scorsese’s scattergun style of directing Goodfellas…
The year had hardly begun when Martin Scorsese blitzed us with Silence, his epic tale of a pair of Jesuits enduring horrendous suffering in 17th-Century Japan. It got a critical mauling for its longueurs but if you stayed with it, as is the case with most Scorsese films, it was well worth it. Most of…
Aubrey Malone