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,…
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…
Aubrey Malone