Our gender defines us. Men fight in trenches while women engage in different types of struggles in civilian life. Which is the stronger sex? Is it the military person or the homemaker? Brain or brawn? Adolf Hitler or Eva Braun? We often hear taunts about the British being “the old enemy” but Ireland never had…
Recent conflicts in Gaza and Palestine have caused many people to reflect anew on the holocaust of World War II. In such circumstances, it might be timely to re-view the 1959 film Conspiracy of Hearts. Featuring Lilli Palmer as the Mother Superior of an Italian convent, this is a moving work dealing with the efforts…
Many musical personages told lies at the beginning of their careers. Bob Dylan would have had people believe he jumped trains with Woody Guthrie. Nadine Coyle used “creative mathematics” about her age to get onto a pop show when she was 16. Louis Walsh made up stories every other day to propel Boyzone into the…
Eock Hudson used to say, “I can’t play a loser because I don’t look like one.” George Clooney doesn’t either, which makes his casting in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly (15, Netflix) questionable. It’s a film about a kind of male Norma Desmond – the faded star of Sunset Boulevard – trying to find out what’s…
There are very few bank robbery films about which I could say that my prevailing impression of them was one of quietness but No Ordinary Heist falls into that category. Having said that, the tension isn’t compromised on that account. Maybe it’s even amplified. Such quietness is a welcome relief from the flash-bang style usually…
If you think the people who shot Veronica Guerin are bad,” a garda said after the heroic journalist was shot in 1996, “you should see what’s coming up now.” Evil spiralled through the decades. Spilt Milk is set a decade before 1996. We’re in the relatively early days of Ireland’s drug ‘culture.’ (I’ve always hated…
All eyes will be on Killarney native Jessica Buckley this weekend to see if she can nab a Best Actress Oscar for her heartbreaking turn as William Shakespeare’s wife mourning their lost son in Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet. If she does, it will be the first time an Irish woman has received the accolade. Brendan Fricker…
If Ray Winstone is the poor man’s Robert De Niro, Danny Dyer is the poor man’s Winstone. But what a performance he gives in The Last Deal (18). It isn’t so much a film as a one-act play with the camera turned on. Brendan Muldowney’s fluid direction makes us forget that. Dyer is Jimmy Banks,…
When I was in college, back in the days when the earth’s crust was still warm, we saw Emily Brontë as the preserve of intellectuals. Charlotte, her sister, was for the middle-of-the-roaders. How we knew it all then. Wuthering Heights (15A) has been filmed over forty times. The latest version has Margot Robbie and Jacob…
The Testament of Ann Lee (R) is a visceral, high-voltage musical directed by Mona Fastvold. It stars Amanda Seyfried as the eponymous 18th century founder of the woman-led ‘Shaker’ religious cult. The daughter of Mancunian Quakers, Lee came from a poverty-stricken background. When she was 22 she joined a sect run by ‘Mother’ Jane Wardley,…
Aubrey Malone