Documentary may not be the most popular genre, but done well can have quite an impact. Powerfuland well-made as it was, it’s hard to see what effect The Disappearedwill have (RTÉ 1 Monday, BBC 4 Tuesday, last week). Darragh MacIntyre certainly re-opened the controversy about the people were ‘disappeared’ in Northern Ireland in the 1970s,…
Category: Film
Phantasmagoria and a touch of whimsy
Thor: The Dark World (12A)There’s no gainsaying the visual splendour of would-be epics like this, even if they tend to resemble little more than sophisticated video games betimes, but the makers rarely seem to bother inserting any subtleties in the plotlines or characterisations, as if the kind of people who go to films like this…
The sins of the mothers
Unmoved by a bittersweet drama
Adrift on a sea of terror
Aubrey Malone enjoys a tense sea-bound thriller
Duel of the Titans
A film too slick for its own good, writes Aubrey Malone
Sister act
Director Woody Allen is back on form, writes Aubrey Malone
In love and war
Aubrey Malone is pleased by ‘intelligent and cerebral film-making’
The Di is cast
Naomi Watts is one of my favourite actresses, and her performance here as Princess Diana has its moments, but it has to be said that she doesn’t look that much like her. Maybe we’ve been spoiled in this department by the fact that Helen Mirren was a dead ringer for Queen Elizabeth in The Queen and Meryl…
Adventures with a high-jinx heroine
Aubrey Malone
Haywire (15) ‘Oh you shouldn’t think of her as being a woman. That would be a mistake.” So says double agent Ewan McGregor to Michael Fassbender about Gina Carano in this amusing spy caper that has the beautiful Carano (a mysterious government operative hired out for unauthorised assignments) gallivanting around the globe on…
The iron lady is not for turning
The Iron Lady (12A) If I could pick a fault with this stupendous film — a ‘biopic’ of Margaret Thatcher — it would be that it exists too much in a continuum. In other words, the scattiness evinced by the octogenarian Baroness (played stunningly by Meryl Streep) in the early scenes doesn’t change hugely…