Category: Film

Love conquers all for confined teenager

Everything Everything (12A) Maddy has spent most of her 18-year life cooped up in her custom-built California home. Her world is the internet. She can’t go outside the door because she suffers from a rare condition SCID (Severe Combined Immuno Deficiency). Translated into English, that means her immune system doesn’t work. Any virus could kill…

Gore spells out grim warning on climate

An Inconvenient Sequel (PG) He walks like John Wayne. He talks like Dr Phil. Who is he? He’s Al Gore, the man who once said, “I used to be the next President of the United States.” That didn’t happen but something else did. He found a life outside politics. A life of lecturing on ecology,…

Atmospheric embryology of ponderous musical guru

“Romantic England’s dead and gone,” says Steven Patrick Morrissey,  deliberately misquoting Yeats in this engrossing biopic, “it’s with Jane Austen in the grave”. Elsewhere his mother makes a wallpaper joke about his hero Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s reputed last words, remember, were: “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” These are just two of the (unexplained)…

Subaquatic terror for shark cage siblings

When someone in a film says, “it’s going to be the best time ever!” you know they’re in for a nightmare – even (especially?) if they’re in an idyllic Mexican holiday resort where all the beautiful people cavort. The ‘wine doubling as blood’ prologue in a swimming pool sets us up for a Jaws-like scare-athon.…

Gothic tale of sublimated longing in remote Virginia

Colin Farrell takes the role Clint Eastwood essayed in Don Siegel’s 1971 version of this civil war story based on Thomas Cullinan’s acclaimed novel A Painted Devil. This time Sofia Coppola directs, replacing Siegel’s misogynistic psychodrama with sensitivity and sultry elegance. Farrell is John McBurney, an injured Yankee soldier who’s deserted his post. He’s taken…

An abortion film that ‘avoids the issue’

Andy (Shane Murray-Corcoran) and Maggie (Iseult Casey) are a young couple from Tipperary who begin a romance when they become students together at TCD. The relationship runs into problems, however,  when Andy’s father Brendan (Ardal O’Hanlon), who’s been suffering from depression since his wife left him, attempts suicide. Andy drops out of college to be…