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…
Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) is the charming villain at the heart of Roofman (R). In real life, Manchester robbed 45 McDonalds restaurants between 1998 and 2000. That’s what I said: 45. He was caught and imprisoned in 2000 but escaped four years later, taking on the identity of a government agent called John Zorn. He…
John Davidson (Robert Aramayo) doesn’t only swear in I Swear (12A). He also spits, twitches, hits people, breaks things and spouts racist and sexist slogans. And yet he’s one of the gentlest people you could meet. What’s going on? It’s Tourette’s Syndrome, a condition people were almost totally ignorant about when John first started experiencing…
In Urchin (15), which is showing at the Irish Film Institute this week, we’re presented with a homeless young man, Mike (Frank Dillane), struggling with problems of drink, drugs and a general attitude of arrogance. He doesn’t seem to understand either himself or his life, lurching from one situation to another. When they turn against…
Widowed fisherwoman Barb (Emma Thompson) is driving through northern Minnesota when she spots a kidnapped teenage girl. She loses her phone signal. Then her truck gives up. She’s 66 years old but she’s determined to rescue the girl. In between efforts to do that she harks back to her own youth, to times she spent…
In 1943 in The Song of Bernadette, Jennifer Jones played Bernadette Soubirous, a 14-year-old peasant who claimed to have had a vision of Our Lady in the French village of Lourdes. Charles Bickford was Fr Peyramale, representing the Church’s initial discounting of her claim before the worldwide attention conferred on her resulted in a change…
Last week I wrote about The Keys of the Kingdom. Another 1944 film, The Picture of Dorian Gray, explores the other pole of the heaven/hell divide. Telling the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil, it has a moodily atmospheric feel to it. German expressionism meets drawing-room comedy in an excellent…
I recently wrote about the clergy in 1940s films. Gregory Peck played a liberal Scottish priest in Keys of the Kingdom in 1944. The film was based on A.J. Cronin’s 1941 novel centering on the efforts of one Fr Francis Chisholm (Peck) to open people’s eyes to the wider message of the Gospels in China.…
Aubrey Malone