Satires, rom-coms, sitcoms, documentaries, cartoons, blockbusters, art movies, actioners, screwball comedies, retro noir dramas, earnest social issue statements, experimental failures and sleeper successes…the year was the usual mixed bag of surprise hits and tired conventions. Two papal films were released: Pope Francis: A Man of His Word and John Paul II in Ireland: A Plea…

The
 Belly
 of
 the Whale
 (15A)   He dresses like a homeless person. He grunts as if he’s just climbed a mountain. His face bears the scars of 101 bad dawns. Yes, it’s Pat Shortt giving us the flipside of his comic persona in yet another of those down-at-heel roles that have become disarmingly familiar for him in recent years.…

Disobedience
 (15A) Head Orthodox rabbi Rav Krushka (Anton Lesser) stands on the altar of his London synagogue speaking about “the beasts of the flesh”. Then he collapses and dies. His estranged daughter Ronit (Rachel Weisz), a photographer living in New York, is informed of the news by her friend Esti (Rachel McAdams). She had an affair…

Widows
 (15A)   Almost every line in this film is gold. And almost every character, no matter how small, is exquisitely drawn. A kind of distaff Goodfellas, it takes off when Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson as, surprise, surprise, a villain) gets killed during a heist. Or does he? The money is burned. Or is it? These…

Katie
 (12A) Why does the woman who put Irish boxing on the international map receive relatively little attention from the media? Is it because she doesn’t disgrace herself enough in public like Conor McGregor? Or, more ominously, because she tends to mention the dreaded ‘G’ word, i.e. God – society’s latest taboo  – in interviews? Imagine…

First
Man
(PG) I’ll never forget the night in 1969 when I sat transfixed in front of a television set watching Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon. I ran outside the house to look up at the Moon itself, marvelling at the fact that it was the same as the one on the television. Now there was…

Pope
 John
 Paul 
II 
in 
Ireland: 
A
 Plea 
for 
Peace 
(12A)   Did the 1979 visit of Pope John Paul II to our shores eventually impact on the Good Friday Agreement that saw “the force of argument”, as this fascinating documentary puts it, replacing “the argument of force”? Or as Seamus Heaney said, helped “hope and history rhyme”? It frames his visit in the context…

The 
Wife 
(15A)   Glenn Close has been labouring away in the Hollywood vineyard for many moons now without too much to show for it. She’s been a bridesmaid at the annual Oscar ceremonies so often, ‘Close’ isn’t just her surname – it’s more like a career description. Some poor editorial decisions haven’t helped. In Fatal Attraction,…

Black 
47
 (15A)   Rambo meets Fionn Mac Cumhaill in this mesmerising drama from Lance Daly. I don’t think we’ve ever had a Celtic action hero before unless we count Braveheart. There’s an almost super-human one in this highly unusual film. It starts out as a kind of post-colonial history lesson about the horrors of the famine…

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…