To begin by asking the least burning question of them all: is Song of the Sea better than The Secret of Kells? I’m inclined to say no. There’s the ol’ “form follows content” argument, which would have it that Kells uses a visual aesthetic that is intimately derived from its primary subject, the illuminated Book […]
Titling one’s movie Calvary, as writer-director John Michael McDonagh has done in his second feature (and also the second entry in his project to give amazing lead roles to Brendan Gleeson), boxes things in pretty well. It has to be a film with a walking, talking Christ surrogate, pretty much, and Calvary‘s is a doozy: […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/13 & 10/15World premiere: 11 March, 2012, South by Southwest Film Festival No film that opens with as big a moment as Citadel does can possibly be written off entirely: a young husband, living with his wife in a virtually uninhabitable public housing building too-ironically named “Edenstown”, has just stepped […]
In Albert Nobbs, Glenn Close plays a man (it is likely you know this if you’ve heard anything about the movie, because it is the only thing that the marketing really cares to mention). More precisely, she plays a woman posing as a man in 19th Century Ireland for economic purposes – she wants to […]
If Neil Jordan’s Ondine were a regular sort of movie, it probably would have opened with a sequence establishing what sort of person its hero was, showing him interacting with his ex-wife and his sickly daughter, chatting with the locals in the small Irish town where he lives, giving us a good sense of the […]
One of the biggest surprises in recent Oscar history was surely the elevation of an unknown French-Belgian-Irish co-production, made by the little-known Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, into the ranks of Best Animated Feature nominees this past spring; thank God for it, too, because without being able to splash “Oscar Nominee!” across the posters, I doubt […]
There’s no such thing as a serious film festival run that entirely misses the occasional bad movie, but I am a bit disappointed that my first real clinker of 2009 happened so quickly. The film in question is The Eclipse, which I plugged into my schedule without reading the capsule, solely for the grave and […]
Winner of the 2008 Camera d’Or at Cannes, Hunger, the first proper narrative feature directed by British artist Steve McQueen, is without question one of the most self-assured first films to come out in ages – among the best debuts for an English-language filmmaker in this decade, along with David Gordon Green’s George Washington and […]
How do you solve a problem like John Boorman? A director who flips from flat-out masterpiece to incoherent wreck like you or I walk out the front door, his career has been a sort of ping-pong match, with early classics like Point Break giving way to later missteps like Beyond Rangoon, or that delightful moment […]
A love story that’s not a love story, and a musical that’s not a musical, there’s something about the tiny Irish import Once that makes you want to fall head-over-heels in love with it no matter how slight it seems to be when you get to thinking about it rationally. I think perhaps it’s because […]
“If we dare to tell the truth about the past, perhaps we shall dare tell the truth about the present.” -Ken Loach, 2006 Cannes Film Festival “A bullet pierced my true love’s side in life’s young spring so early And on my breast in blood she died while soft winds shook the barley.” -Robert Dwyer […]
Breakfast on Pluto far exceeded my expectations, leaving me in the awkward position of expressing a considerable degree of enthusiasm for a movie that, in the cold light of day, doesn’t do much of anything. It’s the story of an orphaned boy named Patrick, living in a small Irish town in the home of a […]
