Martin McDonagh is an acquired taste some people prefer not to acquire. I have to admit I’ve rarely ‘got’ him. He’s made at least one masterpiece (Three Billboards) but I generally find his mix of poignancy and outrageousness cracks under the strain of such divergences. After seeing The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Brian Behan (himself…

English mountaineer George Mallory was once asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. He replied tartly, “Because it’s there.” As well as performing heroics for the Mayo football team, my fellow Ballina native Padraig O’Hora scaled it earlier this year. “No matter what you do or don’t do in your life,” he said, “They…

This is the fiftieth anniversary of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s landmark vehicle, Chinese Roulette. To commemorate the occasion, I bought it on a box set of eight of his films from Amazon. The Commemorative Collection costs £144 but if you’re ‘into’ the controversial German director, you’ll think it’s worth it. I saw many of his films…

Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning (15), which explores a form of hi-tech brainwashing, will strike a chord with those of us who were horrified by TikTok’s recent postings of reckless young motorists driving on the wrong side of the road for thrills, and the people who ‘get off’ by watching such carnage. It also made…

Colleen Hoover self-published her first book. That isn’t unusual. Since then she’s sold twenty million of them. That is. The first time I saw a novel of hers on screen was It Ends With Us. She followed it up with It Starts With Us. (That sounds like an Irish sequel). It Ends With Us dealt…

The recent release of Knife, based on the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie in 2022 – which resulted in him losing an eye – prompted me to look back at some landmark films dealing with people who were attacked, or indeed martyred, for their religious views. In Joan of Arc (1948), Ingrid Bergman played the…

When I was a teacher in a previous incarnation, disruptive pupils were the bane of my life. You could have 39 out of 40 children doing what you said but if the fortieth one stepped out of line, a domino effect took hold. Your day was gone. One day in the staff-room I suggested dealing…

A woman drives a truck along a deserted road. There’s a dog in the middle of it. She’s unsure of what to do. Is it friendly? Injured? She gets out. We flash back to a week before. The dog is in a plane with its master, James Belmont (Brad Pitt). Then tragedy strikes. He gets…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when Andrew Scott is on the screen you’re not looking at anyone else. He has the presence of a Brando, a De Niro, an Al Pacino. And in Pressure (12A), he has their signature tune of being a simmering volcano to boot. I’m using a meteorological metaphor to…

I don’t think I’ve ever had an experience in a cinema quite like the last half hour of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It’s just been re-released into cinemas to commemorate its 35th anniversary. You might say it’s ho-hum today considering the incredible advances in computer generated special effects that have taken place in those years.…