Last week I wrote about The Invite, a film that carried a 15s Cert but was more sexually explicit than most Under-18s ones in the past. Do such certs mean anything these days? It’s a long time since 1934, when Hollywood imposed a restrictive Code on films in an attempt to ‘clean itself up’ under…
Joe and Angela bicker in an apartment. They’re having Pina and Hawk, the couple from upstairs, over for a meal. But Angela hasn’t told Joe. The marriage is obviously in trouble. The Invite (15), a remake of The People Upstairs, plays out like ‘Ninety Shades of Virginia Woolf.’ As the day goes on and the…
Woody Allen was 90 recently. The milestone put me in mind of his oft-quoted quip, “It’s not that I’m afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Woody mixes comedy and tragedy often. He sometimes describes himself as a cross between Ingmar Bergman – the gloomy Swedish film director –…
Intimate dramas are generally more quality-studded than ‘big’ movies. The latter are flattered by the opportunities provided by multiplexes, as opposed to that nightly visitor to our living rooms we call the television set. This summer the following behemoths await you should you decide to submit yourself to their not so tender mercies. Disclosure…
Oscar Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband has been filmed a number of times. This week, however, I’d like to depart from my usual genre and recommend a theatrical production of it that I recently enjoyed at the Gate Theatre. Films are fine, but there’s nothing to compensate for the experience of having real people within…
The last time we saw a ‘good’ thief in a film was Channing Tatum in Roofman. Leo Woodall looks somewhat like Tatum in Daniel Roher’s Tuner (15). He has the same attractively lazy style of acting as him as well, and even wears a similar tracksuit. The ‘double life’ plot of the film has similarities…
The biggest film date of the year is coming up. It’s June 1, the centenary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth. A hundred years on we’re still talking about her, watching her films, seeing documentaries about her on TV and discussing in bars and homes whether she was a good actress or just chewing gum for the…
I was reading a book in Eason’s one day some years ago when I got the distinct impression the words were familiar to me. After a few minutes I realised why. They were my own ones. But someone else’s name was on the cover. Plagiarism is as rampant in the music business as in literature.…
There’s a difference between emotion and emotionalism, between sentiment and sentimentality, between pathos and bathos. Unfortunately, Morgan Matthews’ 500 Miles (12A) loses out on all three counts. If Maeve Binchy was still with us, it’s the kind of thing she’d probably be penning, giving us an Ireland that’s not so much the way we see…
In Trad, a rebellious young fiddle player Shona (Megan Nic Fhionnghaile) leaves her Donegal Gaeltacht home to find herself through her music. She joins a band and lives a hippie lifestyle of hitch-hiking, camping and busking with her sort-of boyfriend Ray (Cathal Coade Palmer) whom she hooks up with on the rebound from the older,…
Aubrey Malone