In pictures: John Bruton's funeral
The State funeral of former taoiseach John Bruton took place at St Peter and Paul’s Church, Dunboyne, Co Meath,on February 10th, 2024.
What to watch in cinemas right now
Take a quick flick through the best and worst of the current crop of cinema releases
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15A cert, gen release, 118 min
Todd Haynes’ beautiful, tricky adaptation of The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith’s early novel concerning a lesbian romance in 1950s New York city surges with emotion.
(Read the review and see the trailer)
12A, gen release, 141 min
In Steven Spielberg’s irresistible film – close to the best he has made this century – Tom Hanks plays James Donovan, the lawyer hired to defend Russian spy Rudolph Abel at the height of the Cold War. The performances are nuanced and the recreations of post-war Brooklyn and Berlin are lavish to the point of indecency.
(Read the review and see the trailer)
15A cert, gen release, 122 min
Depp delivers a very convincing Southie psychopath. (Why are Irish gangsters always so filthy in the movies?). Unfortunately, the script allows little shade to the character. What we have here is the best fake Martin Scorsese film of the year.
(Read the review and see the trailer)
12A cert, limited release and on and on volta.ie, 103 min
“Pain is temporary, losing is permanent,” scowls the record-setting jump jockey Tony “AP” McCoy during Anthony Wonke’s appealing biographical portrait – and don’t be fooled by all the pretty horses: this is a deliciously dark depiction.
(Read the review and see the trailer)
Cert PG, gen release, 101mins
The premise – What if dinosaurs were dirt-farmers? – doesn’t have quite the appealing ring as Toy Story’s what if toys were alive?
(Read the review and see the trailer)
12A cert, gen release, 135 min
The Hunger Games began as an exciting thriller with a beautifully neat (if not particularly original) high concept: youths fight to the death for the entertainment of their cruel masters. The last episode concerns a final assault on the evil president’s mansion. The violence is good. The politics and theorising is rather less so.
(Read the review and see the trailer)
18 cert, limited release, 135 min
Anybody approaching this exhausting 3D parade of high-end erotica as (ahem) a Gaspar Noé virgin might be taken aback at the intelligence that the Argentinean-born Frenchman is mellowing out. The sex is explicit and exquisite. All that’s missing is the violence, the experimentation and any triggers for worthwhile outrage.
(Read the review and see the trailer)
15A cert, gen release, 122 min
Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle, writer and director of this unexpectedly impressive quasi-biopic, have made a picture that is not really about Steve Jobs. Distance is established immediately by casting Michael Fassbender as the irritable, obsessive title character
(Read the review and see the trailer)
12A cert, gen release, 104 min
How much Alan Bennett can you take? Though impeccably acted and bubbling with good jokes, the film version of The Lady in the Van comes close to Bennettian super-saturation.
(Read the review and see the trailer)
Club, IFI, Dublin, 87 min
If you know anything about the wonderful Tangerine you will know that it was shot entirely on iPhones. There is much else to celebrate in Sean Baker’s immersion in the world of LA’s transgender sex workers…
(Read the review and see the trailer)
Cert G, select release, 82mins
A Christmas Star – the first ever Irish Christmas movie – was made by Cinemagic International Film and Television Festival for Young People. It’s a film made for kids by kids and, though not short on Yuletide schmaltz, is pretty good
(Read the review and see the trailer)
12A cert, general release
It is as you thought. John Crowley’s take on Colm Toíbín’s hugely popular 2009 novel is a lovely, lovely film. It is the sort of film to which you could confidently escort the elderly maiden aunt of unkind stereotype. Indeed, that 12A certificate (watch out for “moderate” sex and language) seems, if anything, just the tiniest bit harsh. Like its heroine on her first trip to Coney Island, Brooklyn wriggles demurely into its bathing suit without revealing so much as a square inch of flesh. Yet Nick Hornby’s largely faithful script reminds us of the cheeky perversity at the heart of the novel.
(Read the review and see the trailer)
12A cert, gen release, 148 min
The hysterically positive British response to Spectre kicks up comparisons with that nation’s attitude to the Royal Family. The House of Windsor and the House of Bond may be outdated relics of an imperialist past, but the current incumbents are doing such a bloody fine job that it’s hard to resent either… Like the Royal Family, however, Bond works best when it is indulging in familiar rituals: trooping of the colour, brilliant car chases, weddings between cousins, dubious sex scenes…
(Read the review and see the trailer)
12A cert, gen release, 140 min
Directed by Ridley Scott. Starring Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Chiwetel Ejiofor.
What would two years of alien isolation do to a hitherto robust psyche? This is one of the questions not asked in a castaway drama with all the psychological depth of Gilligan’s Island. Still, Scott’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s high pulp makes up in excitement what it lack in insight. Matt Damon is effective as the botanist left stranded on Mars following a wild storm. The earthbound cast try their hardest in often-superfluous roles. For all its flaws, The Martian undeniably engages.
Read the review and see the trailer
15A cert, gen release, 101 min
This drama has already attracted every culinary metaphor imaginable for something that falls just sort of success. It is neither rare nor well done. It’s a collapsed soufflé. You know the sort of thing. To be fair, it is very pretty, and the inexplicably strong cast does its very best. But the reliance on cliches is unforgivable.
(Read the review and see the trailer)
12A cert, gen release, 106 min
Directed by Sarah Gavron. Starring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Brendan Gleeson, Anne-Marie Duff, Ben Whishaw, Romola Garai, Meryl Streep.
A working-class woman (Carey Mulligan), radicalised by everyday brutalities, stands up for the suffragette cause in the years before the first World War. This overdue drama reminds us how far outside mainstream values the more committed campaigners were forced to tread. It is such a shame that Gavron’s well-appointed film ends up in such bourgeois heritage territory. It’s decently acted and undeniably well meaning, but nobody is likely to confuse Suffragette with The Battle of Algiers.
Read the review and see the trailer
15A cert, gen release, 121 min
Directed by Denis Villeneuve. Starring Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Victor Garber, Jon Bernthal, Daniel Kaluuya, Jeffrey Donovan, Raoul Trujillo, Julio Cesar Cedillo.
Tense thriller set amid drug wars between US paramilitaries and the Mexican cartels. Emily Blunt (with Brolin and Del Toro) stars as an FBI agent who gets sucked into the alphabet soup of federal bully boys. We end up with a propulsive adventure that, while remaining grimly cynical about the motivations of her colleagues, gestures towards the quasi-mythical cinema of both Anthony and Michael Mann. It’s a shame Blunt is asked to be little more than the eyes and ears of the audience.
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Cert 16, general release, 96mins
The Hallow promises to be an Irish mythological horror, replete with wee folk and banshees. Unhappily, it merely name-checks these entities and delivers nothing of the sort. It is, moreover, one of those films that goes from zero to cuckoo bananas in less than a minute.
(Read the review and see the trailer)
15A cert, limited release, 118 min
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Starring Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Léa Seydoux, Olivia Colman, Ben Whishaw, John C Reilly, Ashley Jensen.
Colin Farrell plays David, one of several citizens dispatched to a remote hotel for a reckoning with the social engineers: if they fail to form part of a couple within 45 days, they will be turned into the animal of their choice. Lanthimos’s drily hilarious follow up to Alps and Dogtooth says things about the pressures society places on us to form couples. But there is more: few films so eerily compose a complete and believable fantastic world. Singular.
Read the review and see the trailer
Fri Nov 27 2015 - 15:26
Gallery
In Pictures: Irish designers at London Fashion Week 2023
Irish designers at London Fashion Week 2023
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