While We Watched (15A) is an engrossing documentary from director Vinay Shukla (An Insignificant Man) that shines a laser beam into a dark porthole of India. It follows veteran TV reporter Ravish Kumar into dangerous territory as he struggles with Hindu nationalists and other forces seeking to silence him. Kumar has won many prizes for…
Ensemble casts behaving weirdly? Outlandish things being said by people who don’t seem to think they’re outlandish? Cartoon-like characters cast adrift in a comic book world? Yes, folks, it has to be Wes Anderson. When Robert Altman died, I wondered where I’d go for my fix of familial dysfunctionality. There was no need to worry.…
Iver (Liam Carney) has motor neurone disease. He wants to die. Maria (Maureen Beattie) is the carer entrusted with the task of ending his life. As she’s about to do so, a visitor arrives. Leon (Barry Ward) has had a heroin problem in the past. Now recovered, he’s trying to get a music career going.…
The “meet-cute” is a hallowed tradition in Hollywood romances. It’s how the hero first encounters the heroine. In The Little Mermaid (PG), a live action re-imagining of the Hans Christian Anderson classic directed by Rob Marshall, it acquires an innovative spin, occurring after a shipwreck when disgruntled Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) has his life saved…
In The Laureate (15A), moody British poet Robert Graves (Tom Hughes) is experiencing writer’s block brought on by shellshock after being at the front in World War I. He invites aspiring American poetess Laura Riding (Dianna Agron) to live with him and his wife Nancy (Laura Haddock), an artist, in his country cottage (called, perhaps…
Somebody once described art as “Life with the dull bits cut out”. But sometimes the dull bits can be just as artistic – or more so. That’s the case with Lakelands (15), a beautifully modulated evocation of rural life in Cavan, what Eamon Dunphy likes to refer to as ‘unofficial Ireland’. It’s a part of…
An elderly man, Harold Fry (Jim Broadbent), receives a letter from an old friend, Queenie, one morning to say she’s in a hospice. His immediate impulse is to write a return letter of sympathy to her but after a conversation with a girl in a garage shop whose aunt’s cancer was halted by the support…
When I listened to Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Hallelujah’ on his 1984 album Various Positions I didn’t pay any special attention to it. Interviewing him four years later when he was promoting ‘I’m Your Man’ I didn’t even mention it to him. Bob Dylan played it at a concert later that year. The head of steam…
The actress Loretta Young, whose career started as a child and spanned decades, was a huge advocate of Catholic causes. The money she donated to some of them came from an unusual source – swear boxes. She arranged for these to be installed on the sets of films she was starring in. The idea was…
Remember 1989 when all the Oscar heat was centred around My Left Foot? We had enormous success that year. The same energy is building around The Banshees of Inisherin for this weekend’s gong-fest. Notwithstanding my misgivings about Martin McDonagh’s quasi-trad parable, like the rest of the country I’ll be rooting for Messrs Farrell, Gleeson, Keoghan…
Aubrey Malone