The Post Office in Ireland: An Illustrated History by Stephen Ferguson (Irish Academic Press, €26.99) At this time of the year over Christmas and the New Year we come to appreciate the post, which brings messages of love and peace and presents from relatives and friends all over the world, some not seen in person…
Molly’s Game (15) When Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) has a freak accident in the snow at an Olympic skiing event, she tries to build an alternative career as a cocktail waitress, a real estate agent and, finally, running high stakes poker games for VIPs. Aaron Sorkin trades heavily on Martin Scorsese’s scattergun style of directing Goodfellas…
Over the Christmas period you expect lots of feel-good movies and carol services, which is all very good, but every year I look out for something new, something different, a programme that engages in a creative and contemporary way with the Christmas story of the Gospels. Happily I found a few such programmes this year.…
The World of Books The notion that the Apostle of Ireland was also the country’s first archaeologist is not, I should hasten to admit, an aberration of my own. It was the idea of my late friend Glyn Daniel [pictured], Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge. When the very suggestive evidence is laid out the…
Looking back on the media landscape in 2017 it’s good to report quite a few excellent programmes, including some very positive to religious faith, though there are disappointments as well. One of the programmes that stands out most for me is last June’s BBC drama series Broken, starring Sean Bean as a troubled priest in…
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” says Kevin Spacey’s Keyser Söze in 1996’s The Usual Suspects. It was, writes Tracy Robey at racked.com, a vision of evil – hidden in plain sight and wearing utterly forgettable clothes – “that captured pop culture’s imagination”. Trumping other 1990s takes…
‘Old Christmas is still alive…’ Once again Christ-mas, and all its associations, religious and commercial, has passed over and the New Year approaches. But this is only in Western countries, in Europe, the Americas, and parts of Africa. In the Levant, those Asian countries where the sun rises each day among the most ancient Christian…
Nacho Libre TG 4, Saturday, December 23, 10.55 pm (2006) Starring Jack Black. Directed by Jared Hess. Berated all his life by those around him, a monk follows his dream and dons a mask to moonlight as a Luchador (Mexican wrestler). Warm, funny, and some would say tasteless in spots. Sacred Music at Christmas BBC…
Anthony Redmond I have no hesitation in saying that the book that made the biggest impression on me, not just this year, but for quite a few years, is Letters from Aleppo by Fr Ibrahim Alsabagh (Columba Press, € 14.99). It is a wonderfully moving and powerful account of a dedicated priest’s daily life in…
The year had hardly begun when Martin Scorsese blitzed us with Silence, his epic tale of a pair of Jesuits enduring horrendous suffering in 17th-Century Japan. It got a critical mauling for its longueurs but if you stayed with it, as is the case with most Scorsese films, it was well worth it. Most of…
Peter Costello
Aubrey Malone
Brendan O’Regan
Greg Daly