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 the cinema this week
Take a quick flick through the best and worst of the current crop of cinema releases
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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)
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…
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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.
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Cert 15A, select release, 116mins
A Pulitzer-winning author struggles to raise his young cutsey-pie daughter alone. It’s complicated: for one thing, the author is embodied by a fiercely intense Russell Crowe....
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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)
Club, IFI, Dublin, 96 min
David Sington, director of In The Shadow of the Moon, presents us with an irresistible story in his fascinating, if flawed, new documentary in which Nick Yarris – sentenced to death for rape and murder in 1982 – tells his own story.
(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)
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)
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)
PG cert, general release, 88 min
Davis Guggenheim’s portrait of teenage Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai is remarkable in terms of access to its subject’s life. We travel with her as she visits schoolgirls in Kenya, meets refugees on the Syrian border and – most poignantly – muddles along at school in Birmingham…
(Read the review and see the trailer)
Cert 15A, gen release, 86mins.
Directed by Conor Horgan. Featuring Rory O’Neill/Panti Bliss.
How do we love The Queen of Ireland? Let me count the ways. It’s not just that the film offers a big, warm, congratulatory hug for a nation which finally learned to stop worrying and love its own people. It’s not only that it’s the most important social document of the century, thus far. Leaving aside its importance as a historical chronicle, The Queen of Ireland is a super movie, replete with tragedy, comedy, a plucky, unlikely heroine, and a sweeping dramatic arc. There is, additionally, something of a perfect storm about the project…
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18 cert, general release, 103 min
Returning to an era most of us are happy to have forgotten, John Niven’s adaptation of his novel has Steven Stelfox, Nicholas Hoult’s clumsily named character, battering a colleague to death within minutes of the credits rolling. It’s 1997 and everybody is on the hunt for the new Blur or Oasis. We might conclude that the pressure has driven our hero insane. Perhaps the problem is congenital.
(Read the review and see the trailer)
15A cert, general release, 92 min
It’s all about the body parts: namely tits, ass and intestines as three dorky teens – decent-minded Ben (Tye Sheridan), perennially horny Carter (Logan Miller) and bully-bait Augie (Joey Morgan) – team up with a strip-club cocktail waitress (Sarah Dumont) to lay splattery waste to hordes of the undead.
(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.
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PG cert, gen release, 111 min
Directed by Joe Wright. Starring Levi Miller, Hugh Jackman, Garrett Hedlund, Rooney Mara, Amanda Seyfried, Adeel Akhtar, Cara Delevingne.
Come back, Hook! All is forgiven. Strange origin story for Peter Pan in which – among other eccentricities – Hedlund’s Hook remains a cheery Indiana Jones figure throughout. Unintentionally named for the reviews it has attracted, Joe Wright’s Pan seems set to confirm that JM Barrie’s most famous creation has no currency outside the 20th century. You may as well draw conclusions about Pan’s relevance by staring up the back end of a horse.
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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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12A cert, general release, 106 min.
Directed by Breck Eisner. Starring Vin Diesel, Rose Leslie, Elijah Wood, Michael Caine, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Isaach De Bankolé .
If you care to read up on such things, you will discover that The Last Witch Hunter was borne from “conversations with Vin Diesel”. Diesel is, among many other things, a fan of (the not entirely dissimilar) Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, as well as this movie’s producer and star. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a reality where The Last Witch Hunter could exist without Vin Diesel…
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PG cert, gen release, 89 min
Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky. Starring Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Selena Gomez, Kevin James, David Spade, Steve Buscemi, Keegan-Michael Key, Molly Shannon.
Cartoon fans were somewhat perplexed when the first feature film from Tartakovsky turned out to be the rather pedestrian Hotel Transylvania. But audiences rather liked the idea of a monster resort populated by Adam Sandler players. Happily, this second monster mash makes for a slicker spectacle than the 2012 original even if most of the jokes are as old as the 539-year-old protagonist. The corniness is, indeed, all part of the fun. Will make squillions.
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15A cert, gen release, 118 min
Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Starring Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Charlie Hunnam, Jim Beaver.
Mia Wasikowska (left), an American heiress, is swept off her feet by dashing English baronet Tom Hiddleston. She is taken to Sharpe’s crumbling family pile to live with his sinister sister Jessica Chastain and various ghosts. Del Toro’s well-staffed Gothic romance ought to play like an inverted Northanger Abbey. But somehow, despite a spectacular set, the film can’t quite draw the viewer in. Away from the Manderley-ish opulence and the oozing walls, structurally, Crimson Peak is a mess. Disappointing.
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15A cert, gen release, 113 min
Directed by Justin Kurzel. Starring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Paddy Considine, Sean Harris, Jack Reynor, Elizabeth Debicki, David Thewlis.
The braw news is that Kurzel, Australian director of the agreeably horrible Snowtown, has knocked together the most muscular, propulsive film version of Shakespeare’s most cinematic tragedy. Adam Arkapaw’s camera fights with mist, smoke and Caledonian murk to locate convincing mid-medieval fug. The film features an impressively tortured Macbeth in Michael Fassbender and an unusually exotic Lady Macbeth in Cotillard. It’s just a shame that so much of the dialogue is so muddy.
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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.
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Cert 15A, gen release, 103mins
Directed by Stephen Frears. Starring Ben Foster, Chris O’Dowd, Guillaume Canet, Jesse Plemons, Lee Pace, Denis Ménochet, Dustin Hoffman.
Stephen Frears’s clever biographical drama wisely benches the perspective of plucky sports journalist David Walsh (Chris O’Dowd) in favour of a detailed account of Lance Armstrong’s (Ben Foster) extraordinary doping regimen. Foster is superbly and appositely hubristic in the central role. We’re never sure if his increasingly volatile Armstrong wishes to advance the lie or get caught in the telling. Budgetary constraints tell on occasion, but the cast working from a nuanced screenplay by John Hodge (Trainspotting, Shallow Grave) ensure the picture takes the yellow jersey.
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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 13 2015 - 12:53
Gallery
In Pictures: Irish designers at London Fashion Week 2023
Irish designers at London Fashion Week 2023
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