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…
Richard Burton would have been 100 years old a few days ago. My book Poisoned Chalice: How Fame Ruined Richard Burton, is published by Bear Manor Media. It celebrates his life and career while taking time to point out that both were seriously compromised by what he called his “Faustian” pact with the devil, i.e.…
When Chris Grant (Scott Eastwood) is killed in a car crash alongside his sister-in-law Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) in Regretting You (12A), it exposes the fact that they were having an affair. The revelation opens up a Pandora’s Box of reactions from Chris’ wife Morgan (Allison Williams), his daughter Clara (McKenna Grace) and Jenny’s husband Jonah…
None of the classics are safe anymore. Hedda (R) is the latest one to receive a makeover. Dia Da Costa has transplanted the feminist fable Hedda Gabler from Henrik Ibsen’s Norway to a 1950s English manor. The text has been changed to make it relevant for the #MeToo era. With all these iterations are we…
Aubrey Malone