The Beast

A salutary lesson in how not to take a very short story and turn it into a very long film. It’s certainly one to swerve if you’re the least bit tired (which I was). Henry James’ source novella was barely 30 pages long when it first surfaced in 1902 and it’s hard to fathom just…

Mothers Instinct

Douglas Sirk meets Patricia Highsmith in this entertaining but ultimately silly film. Mothers Instinct is based on the book Behind the Hatred by Barbara Abel and pits Alice (Jessica Chastain) against Celine (Anne Hathaway) in a paranoid parental feud which spirals, disastrously and all too quickly, out of control. Things start calmly enough and initially…

God’s Creatures

An advert for The Irish Tourist Board appeared just before the screening of God’s Creatures. It featured a sparkling, twinkling, smiley Colleen gushing over scenes of sunshine and craic. “I think the Irish are the funniest people in the world. They’re all such characters and you remember the characters long after you’ve forgotten their story”.…

The Woman King

Given the critical and commercial success of Gina Prince Bythewood’s blackbuster, it’s no great surprise to learn that a follow up is already under consideration. The working title is The Man Queen and it tells the story of an unpopular king who becomes so exasperated by the constant unfavourable comparisons with his recently deceased, long…

The Big Hit

Back in the 1970s the first Mrs H was a devotee of the theatre of the absurd. If there was a sniff of Ianesco in the air she would be trawling ticketing sites and dusting off her opera glasses, keen as mustard to see actors pretending to be a hippopotamus. In the interests of the…

Ammonite

I was secretly hoping that this piece of prestige art house fare would be truly terrible, just so that I could start the review with “What a load of old Coprolite”. But with Kate Winslet as Mary Anning and Saoirse Ronan as Charlotte we were on course to unearth an entirely different kind of nugget.…

Gloria Bell

Question. Why would Sebastian Lelio want to remake his film in English when, in its original Spanish,  it was successful enough to attract Oscar nominations and was considered practically perfect at the time by audiences and critics alike? As a study of a mature woman struggling with finding a place in an ever so slightly…

The Children Act

Adapted from his own novel, this was a classic Ian McEwan piece which delved into the consequences of decision making in morally grey areas and the vagaries of interpersonal relationships. Directed by Richard Eyre it provided a sound platform from which Emma Thompson could deliver an intriguing performance, as measured and thoughtful as it was…

L’Amant Double

Q. When is a pregnancy not a pregnancy? A. When the bump is the skeletal remains of your twin sister absorbed by you whilst still inside your mother’s womb. Obviously. The biggest surprise for me in this film was just how the actors kept straight faces during such a lurid and ridiculous erotic melodrama. I’d…

Early Man

A rare misfire from Aardman studios. Hopefully this will be a temporary blip and we can look forwards to more of the lovably daft, homespun fare with which won them so many plaudits at home and abroad. In courting a family audience Nick Park has lost the trademark idiosyncrasy which used to appeal to everyone.…

Phantom Threads

Sew….. Sew…..Knit Knit Sew…is pretty much what we get in Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest and wackiest offering so far. We are in the world of Haute Couture in 1950s London, where Reynolds Woodcock (a confirmed batchelor) makes frocks with his sister and business partner Cyril (nice one). Their label supplies grotesquely expensive dresses to the…

Finding Your Feet

There they were, on the end of yer legs all the time. This was a film trailed as a feel good comedy about a geriatric amateur dance troop whose collective quirky optimism sees them become minor celebrities following a viral U Tube posting. This in turn leads to an invition to perform at an international…

The Zookeeper’s Wife

Jessica Chastain is unquestionably the heart and soul of this film and gives her usual measured performance. She plays Antonina Zabinski the curator of Warsaw Zoo, which in 1939 was first bombed then taken over by the invading Nazis. Hitler’s head zoologist (a real post, tho’ it does sound like a renegade from Allo Allo)…

Elle

This French psychosexual drama from the provocative lens of Paul Verhoven has been dividing audiences from Ares to Tetes – and you can certainly see why. Is it the story of a successful self confident woman, who refuses to become a victim after being subjected to a very violent example of stranger rape? Or is…

Moonlight

After Spotlight shone it’s dark torch on the malevolence in the Catholc church to pick up the 2016 Oscar for best film, along comes Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight to turn its mellower light on the coming of age of a young, gay, black man living in the Miami projects to bag the 2017 prize. Fully expect…

The Fencer

Tastefully shot in muted autumnal shades Klaus Haro’s fictionalised account of life in Estonia in the aftermath of WWII centres on Endel Nelis (Mart Avandi), a rather haunted young man who arrives in the small backwater town of Haapsalu in 1952. He takes a job as a sports teacher at the local high school despite…

The Idol

Two films for the price of one here. The first, set in 2005 plays like an Islamic version of Sing Street. It is an affecting coming of age story about 12 year old Mohammed (Qais Atallah), his tomboy sister Nour (Hiba Atallah) and two close friends growing up together in Gaza City. They’re miniature pan…

Disorder

That would be of the post traumatic stress kind. Alice Winocour is the writer and director of this initially interesting variant on the home invasion movie. Vincent (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a member of the French special forces, temporarily suspended from duty whilst undergoing assessments about his fitness for further tours of duty. He carries a…

Sunset Song

Terence Davies has brought his long cherished project, (adapting Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s book) to the big screen with decidedly mixed results. I don’t know the book, nor do I know enough of the Doric dialect in which it is written to say whether the actors got anywhere close to matching the voices on the page.…

Sicario

Denis Villneurve has assembled an impressive back catalogue including Prisoners, Enemy and Incendies, each of which has a certain freshness and originality, but here I felt he disappointed. The story is a melange of some very familiar themes. Mexican drug cartel, FBI/CIA/Special Opps shenanigans, an out of her depth rookie agent and a Columbian hitman…