Remember 1989 when all the Oscar heat was centred around My Left Foot? We had enormous success that year. The same energy is building around The Banshees of Inisherin for this weekend’s gong-fest. Notwithstanding my misgivings about Martin McDonagh’s quasi-trad parable, like the rest of the country I’ll be rooting for Messrs Farrell, Gleeson, Keoghan…
On the surface it looks as if Zoe (Lily James) is commitment-phobic. She isn’t really. It’s just that Cupid hasn’t fired his arrows yet. When her mother Cath (Emma Thompson) tries to fix her up with a local vet, the nice but dull James (Oliver Chris) we know it just ain’t gonna work. She has…
It’s hard to believe Audrey Hepburn is dead 30 years this year. I loved her as an actress since I was a child, having been enthralled by her beauty and grace. She’d lost neither of these qualities when I interviewed her in 1988 at the Burlington Hotel, as it was then called. But at this…
Babylon (18) isn’t just a film, it’s an experience. The first great release of 2023, it’s a simultaneous celebration and denunciation of a wild and wacky era in film-making. Everything Damien Chazelle does has the word ‘Big’ written all over it. If he isn’t careful, he’ll become our era’s answer to Cecil B. De Mille.…
As the new year begins I’m reminded that Charlton Heston was born 100 years ago. One of his first major roles was as Moses in Cecil B. De Mille’s The Ten Commandments. Parting the Red Sea could be said to be starting at the top. He decided to play him as “a man much scarred…
A film year in review Gingerly we stepped out of Covid-19. We were hit with films that that were delayed – but not derailed – by the virus: Munich, Cyrano, Memoria, Cow. February brought A Journal for Jordan, The Eyes of Tammy Faye and a blockbuster, Jurassic World. I seemed to be watching these kinds…
North Circular Road has so many connotations for people, maybe we shouldn’t just see it as a road anymore but a connection point between different lifestyles and cultures. As one of the speakers in North Circular (15A, Irish film Institute) says, it may end at Sheriff Street geographically but in spirit it stretches to “the…
My ignorance of the pigeon world was almost absolute before I saw Million Dollar Pigeons (15A), an unusual documentary about the high-flying world of pigeon fanciers. Gavin Fitzgerald’s film goes all over the world. We see those at the top of the sport in America, South Africa, China and even Thailand. He starts with a…
Maybe we’ll look back on 2022 as the year of women in films. A documentary on Mother Teresa was recently released, as was one about Lyra McKee, the investigative journalist who was murdered by dissident republicans on Holy Thursday in 2019. Also a documentary on the poet and novelist Doireann Ní Ghriofa and the film…
When the inimitable Sam Goldwyn was asked once what was wrong with the American film industry he famously replied, “We need some new cliches”. Writer/director Martin McDonagh, in his ambition to be the Irish Quentin Tarantino, has spent the last number of years providing us with his version of these. He’s unpicked stage-Irishry with some…
Aubrey Malone