An Taibhse (The Ghost, 15A) Is this Ireland’s answer to The Shining? An attempt to reprise the success of Kneecap? An imaginative horror film it has a man and his daughter working as caretakers in a spooky Georgian mansion during a harsh post-Famine winter. What’s next on the national landscape – a gaeilgeoir version of…
Have you ever seen a convent of nuns that comprises a former beauty queen, a drug dealer whose life was – literally – saved by the Bible, a nun who wears a tattoo, one who swears, one who jokes about the decapitation of John the Baptist, one who sways her hips as she dances to…
How important is art in films? Are we living in a world where money rules OK and everything else gets squashed into the background? One of the first films I saw when I came to Dublin was Vittorio De Sica’s earthy Bicycle Thieves, a ‘cinema verité’ story of a man and his son living on…
We’re an hour into Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths (12A) before a character says to Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), “Why are you so angry?” It’s a question you’re entitled to be asking yourself from the first minute of the film. Leigh doesn’t spoon-feed us with answers to it. Hurt people hurt people. There’s a suggestion she may…
We Live in Time (15) is a flashback-filled love story starring Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh. Pugh has cancer but is upbeat about it – and indeed about everything. The film narrowly avoids being a tearjerker as she navigates her way through her medical problems. There are some cringy scenes, most of them engineered by…
September 5 began like any other day in Munich 1972. The Olympic Games were taking place there. Everyone was excited. Mark Spitz had just won his seventh gold medal in eight days. Then terror struck. Or to be more precise, terrorism. Eleven Jewish athletes were taken hostage by five members of a commando wing of…
Like many readers of this paper I grew up in an era where the depiction of nuns on screen was generally positive. I’m talking about films like Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (1957), The Bells of Saint Marys (1945), Black Narcissus (1947) and so on. I once wrote in these pages of an interview I conducted…
The absence – or removal – of love is the theme of several films available from Amazon and other online outlets. Still Water is a beautifully made work about a prayerful blue-collar man played by Matt Damon. He travels from Oklahoma to Marseilles to try and free his daughter from prison. She’s been there for…
A pope has died. The throne of the Holy See is vacant. A successor must be appointed. Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is Dean of the College of Cardinals. He’s chosen to oversee the selection process. He does so reluctantly as he’s struggling with his prayer life. Tensions rise in St Peter’s Basilica as various contenders…
It’s that time of the year again. The French film season at the Irish Film Institute runs from November 13 to 24. France knows a thing or three about making movies. Sometimes, admittedly, they’re too talky. (Eric Rohmer, anyone?) There’s also a danger of pretentiousness. You may come out of a cinema shaking your head…