Somebody once described art as “Life with the dull bits cut out”. But sometimes the dull bits can be just as artistic – or more so. That’s the case with Lakelands (15), a beautifully modulated evocation of rural life in Cavan, what Eamon Dunphy likes to refer to as ‘unofficial Ireland’. It’s a part of…
An elderly man, Harold Fry (Jim Broadbent), receives a letter from an old friend, Queenie, one morning to say she’s in a hospice. His immediate impulse is to write a return letter of sympathy to her but after a conversation with a girl in a garage shop whose aunt’s cancer was halted by the support…
When I listened to Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Hallelujah’ on his 1984 album Various Positions I didn’t pay any special attention to it. Interviewing him four years later when he was promoting ‘I’m Your Man’ I didn’t even mention it to him. Bob Dylan played it at a concert later that year. The head of steam…
The actress Loretta Young, whose career started as a child and spanned decades, was a huge advocate of Catholic causes. The money she donated to some of them came from an unusual source – swear boxes. She arranged for these to be installed on the sets of films she was starring in. The idea was…
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…