A Dark Song (16) Grieving mum seeks atonement for murdered sonMost horror films seem to populate their casts with masochists. They summon up demons to plague them. They run repeatedly into the face of danger. They seem geared towards inflicting the greatest amount of punishment on themselves for the least possible gain. Sophia Howard (Catherine…
Graduation (PG) You won’t see a better film about abortion than Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days. It should be used as a resource by anyone campaigning against the repeal of the Eighth Amendment. Now Cristian Mungiu is back with another equally absorbing moral parable. Again he uses the same lingering scenes to depict the…
The Secret Scripture (12A) This curious film, based on Sebastian Barry’s Booker Prize nominated novel, will confirm watchers in the view that over-arching anti-clericalism seems increasingly prevalent in films today. Many of them seem to delight in shining a laser on Ireland’s dark past, especially in the treatment of vulnerable young women, especially vulnerable young…
The adorable Emma Watson proves there’s life after Harry Potter in Disney’s latest version of Beauty and the Beast. This time the beast (Dan Stevens) can only be freed from his wolf-like guise by the love of Watson, who’s distraught at being imprisoned in his enchanted castle until she begins to realise his heart is…
Logan (15) They say there are really only a half dozen plotlines. Everything else in film (and literature?) is an exemplification of these templates. Old wine, new bottles. And so it is here. For all the blood-spattering, when we get down to it this is really just another tale of crime and punishment, of righting…
Trespass Against Us (15A) Substitute cars for horses and this is a cowboy movie. There’s the same tribal loyalty, the same love of the outsider, the same revulsion towards authority. The heroes and villains of the wild west become the cops and robbers of regional Britain. We could also see it as the travellers’ answer…
Much as I admired La La Land I never like to see one film sweeping the boards at the Oscar ceremonies – as Damien Chazelle’s film seems set to do this year – any more than I like to see the Lotto being won by one person instead of a syndicate. At the time of…
Fences (12A) ‘Good fences make good neighbours’, wrote Robert Frost. The present – heavily symbolic – film re-writes that epithet to read, ‘some people build fences to keep people out and other people build them to keep people in’. Based on August Wilson’s Pulitzer pize-winning play of the same name, it deals with the efforts…
Hacksaw Ridge (16) There are so many Christological echoes in this blistering World War II tale, by the end you expect messianic doctor Desmond Dos (Andrew Garfield) to say something like, “I am who I am” as he’s being stretchered off the battlefield. A pacifist from the outset, he enlists in the army on an…
Jackie (15A) If you get the accent right, the part usually takes care of itself. Natalie Portman does that to an exemplary degree here – right down to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s tendency to pronounce ‘r’ as ‘w’ – and ends up giving a performance of such quality that the film, like its title, truly belongs…
Aubrey Malone