The Children Act (12A) The penultimate scene of this moving (if occasionally sugar-coated) study of lives lived to the full, lives thrown away and those gone stale, is heavily reminiscent of the last one in John Huston’s magisterial The Dead. In that film, Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) has to listen to his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston) telling him…
Pope Francis: A Man of his Word (PG) St Francis of Assisi travelled to the Holy Land 800 years ago to try and end a war. Today his successor is continuing that journey. Pope Francis – ‘Papa Francesco!’ to the crowds who swarm around him in his native Argentina – has made it his mission to continue the work of his…
The Image You Missed (PG) The idea was good: dovetail the idea of a fractured fraternal relationship with a fractured country. Unfortunately, this Donal Foreman feature, which tenuously examines his relationship with his father, the late American documentarian Arthur MacCaig, against the backdrop of the Troubles, is far too skimpy and staccato to justify the tantalising potential of…
L’Apparition Vincent Lindon is one of my favourite French actors. He’s always reminded me of Miley from Glenroe. In a country where we expect to find more clean-cut heroes, he has more the look of a character actor than a leading man with his lived-in face. You feel he’s been out digging fields all…
The Secret of Marrowbone (15A) There’s a scene in this where a girl puts her hand into a hole in the ceiling with a morsel of food to feed a skunk that’s living in her attic. When she does so, a human hand fondles her. I don’t know about you, but if that happened to me I’d be…
Kissing Candice (18) Midway through this psychedelic odyssey – the hell that is modern Ireland – I found myself thinking how much Ann Skelly, its main star, resembled Lady Lavery. And how, if Lady Lavery was the iconic image of a more halcyon time, Skelly could go on to become the face of the not so…
The Happy Prince (15A) Rupert Everett has been fascinated by Oscar Wilde for most of his life. He’s acted in many of his plays on Broadway and played his alter ego in films like The Importance of Being Ernest and An Ideal Husband. He also played Wilde himself in David Hare’s The Judas Kiss on the West…
Edie (12A) “Too late for chips?” the 83-year-old Edie (Sheila Hancock) asks her cook in a fast food restaurant. “Never too late for you, Edie,” he replies in what becomes a lightbulb moment for her. This is a sweet little film about a self-professed ‘geriatric’ trying to roll back the years. It’s “never too late”…
Citizen Lane (G) Such was the esteem in which art dealer Hugh Lane was held, if he even looked at a painting in a gallery, its value escalated. He lived in a period of literary rather than artistic ferment in Ireland. There were more people like W.B. Yeats than his brother Jack. “I’m going to revive…
I Feel Pretty (12A) Namechecking the endearing Natalie Wood tune from West Side Story in its title, this comes to us with the oldest message in movies: it’s the inner person that counts in matters of the heart rather than the outer one. Renee Bennett (Amy Schumer) is a kooky IT worker who’s a bit on the…
Aubrey Malone