Baz Luhrmann directed an electrifying biopic of Elvis Presley, Elvis, in 2022. While researching it, he discovered a treasure trove of previously unseen footage of Elvis in concert. He couldn’t use this, obviously, since another person (Austin Butler) was playing Elvis in the film. All we saw of the ‘real’ Elvis was a few minutes…
Domhnall Gleeson recently said Rachel McAdams “changes a room merely by entering it.” I wondered if I was hearing him right. He wasn’t talking about Einstein or Winston Churchill. Domhnall appeared with McAdams in About Time, an average enough film. Where does this kind of hyperbole emanate from? Are film stars on such elevated plateaus…
Someone once said that when you talk about your marriage problems to a third party, all you’re doing is giving evidence at an inquest. The quote was hardly a vote of confidence in counsellors. Alex (Will Arnett) deals with such problems idiosyncratically in Is This Thing On? (15A). Instead of using an individual person, he…
The scatterbrained, chain-smoking Helen (Claire Foy) is a rather unlikely Cambridge lecturer in H is For Hawk (12A). At the beginning of the film she loses her father, photo-journalist Ali (Brendan Gleeson). She deals with her grief by acquiring a wild goshawk as a pet – though she denies it’s a hobby, or that the…
Deirdre Morley is in the news at the moment because of a brouhaha involving the release of her psychiatric records relating to the inquest into her children’s deaths. You may remember she suffocated her three sons in 2020 and was deemed not guilty by reason of insanity. The theme of infanticide in popular culture has…
Failure, they say, is an orphan, whereas success has a thousand fathers. Who should we credit for people’s fame – themselves or the people behind them? Would Barry McGuigan have got where he was without Barney Eastwood? I thought of McGuigan as I watched Giant (15A), a pleasant film about the career of another pint-sized…
The Netflix mini-series Adolescent was the most talked about one of the year. It raised all sorts of questions about peer pressure, cyber-bullying, toxic masculinity and what children get up to when they’re not being monitored by their parents. The King of Kings told the story of Christ’s life in animated form using a neglected…
Whose side were you on during the Civil War? I’m not talking about the 1922 one caused by the rift between Dev and Michael Collins. I mean the one that impassioned maybe even more people in 2002. Yes, my friends, that was the year Mick McCarthy sent Ireland’s best player home from the World Cup.…
I recently wrote about the theme of priests fighting crime in films of the thirties and forties. It also featured in some fifties films. The ‘Method’ actor Montgomery Clift was impressive in I Confess in 1951, playing a priest who goes to his death rather than break the seal of the confessional. A murderer confesses…
Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday. I don’t know.” With these chilling words, which open Albert Camus’ epochal 1942 novel L’Etranger, Camus enunciated a new style of writing, one that indexed the disaffected soul of his anti-hero Meursault, a man who can’t feel emotions the way the rest of us do. Meursault is…
Aubrey Malone