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A scene from Town of Strangers: Chloe and her friend trying out dance moves

Film Review: Town of Strangers and a small town theme

In Town of Strangers, the viewer can sense the director's empathy, one is aware of a listening ear for the people who turned up for audition and ended up telling their personal stories

Movie • 10 Mar 21

À L'abordage: part road movie, part Rohmer-esque account of youthful amours

À L'abordage and young love's sweet song of the South

Felix, a young nurse, falls in love with a girl named Alma at an open-air party by the Seine and follows her, though uninvited, to the south of France in this charming yet curiously touching drama, which expertly handles the highs and lows of young love

Movies • 13 Nov 20

Isabelle Huppert: a double life as her income markedly improves in Mama Weed

Huppert triumphs in zany crime caper Mama Weed

Mama Weed - original title La Daronne, which means The Matron - stars Isabelle Huppert as an Arabic/French translator for the Paris police. Being short of money, she eventually succumbs to doing business with the Moroccan drug mafia

Movies • 13 Nov 20

Irish actress Lauren Coe plays the beleagured young teenager Laurie in Nocturnal

Nocturnal upends the cliche about fatherhood and flight

Bleak and intense, Nocturnal is mildly creepy but curiously credible, upending the lazy cliche viz a viz so-called irresponsible fathers who, it is believed, scarper and ultimately forget.

Movie Review • 18 Sep 20

Ingvar Sigurdsson and Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir in A White, White Day

A White, White Day's slow-burn revenge drama

The tormented policeman Ingimundir tries to hold things together in a starkly remote Icelandic outpost before the desire for revenge takes over in Hlynur Palmason's compelling drama.

Movie Review • 04 Sep 20

Max Richter performs SLEEP
(Photo Rahi Rezvani)

Wide awake in America with Max Richter's SLEEP

The film Max Richter's SLEEP introduces composer and musician Max Richter and his creative partner Yulia Mahr as a performance of his celebrated eight-hour opus is staged in Los Angeles's Grand Park.

Movie Review • 04 Sep 20

Jan Six, the father: "It's not about Rembrandt, it's about the first Jan Six."

My Rembrandt - Money and Old Master mania

350 years after his death, the paintings of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) are changing hands for vast sums, but your reviewer would have preferred a less consciously sensational film that told us more about Rembrandt and his art

Movie Review • 04 Sep 20

Six people walk into a lift and mayhem ensues

The bleakly humorous Lift is an elevating experience

Smart and hard-edged and set in centre-city Dublin, Lift elicits to full effect the black humour involved when six people get stuck in a lift on a Friday evening, as pub-time beckons.

Film Reviews • 14 Jul 20

When All is Ruin Once Again: poignant admonitory note about the Earth and its ecology

When All is Ruin Once Again: A poignant warning note

When All is Ruin Again draws near to poet WB Yeats' tower at Thoorballylee, cleaving close to a poetic vision of destiny, of generations passing, of a language threatened, with a subtly-pitched warning note about mankind's exploitation of the planet.

Reviews • 18 Apr 20

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, with Adele Haenel and Noémie Merlant

Breton passion in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a cool, almost ascetic work exploring sexual repression and sexual longing - sides perhaps of the same 18th century French coin - between two young women, an artist and her portrait subject

Movies • 02 Mar 20

You want it darker? Then you got Downhill

Will Ferrell plays it dark in Downhill

This thought-provoking remake of Ruben Östlund's 2014 Swedish-language film Force Majeure deftly juggles dark passages with oddly comic counterbalance

Movies • 25 Feb 20

Harrison Ford as John Thornton and his beloved dog Buck in The Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild is doggone good

This fascinating adaptation of Jack London's classic 1903 novel, set in Canadian Yukon territory in the 1890s is a must-see.

Movies • 19 Feb 20

Jihad Jane aka Colleen R LaRose following her release from prison as she appears in Ciaran Cassidy's documentary

Jihad Jane and the Waterford link in new documentary

Ciaran Cassidy's fascinating documentary, Jihad Jane, hears the stories of two American women who were imprisoned following charges related to terrorist conspiracy in 2010.

Movies • 17 Feb 20

It's a risky climb but they're upwardly mobile: the Kim family in Parasite

Parasite: worth seeing if only for after-screen debate

Winner of four Oscars, Palme d'Or 2019 and Best Foreign Motion Picture at the Golden Globes, Parasite boldly attempts satire about Seoul's haves and have-nots.

Movie Review • 17 Feb 20

Blake Lively and Jude Law in The Rhythm Section

The Rhythm Section is Bond-lite and little else

Replace Liam Neeson with Blake Lively and what you have in The Rhythm Section is essentially another Taken movie. The film wants to be both earnest and tongue-in cheek, with vintage pop tunes to lighten the earnestness - now which is it, folks?

Movie Review • 29 Jan 20

Film review: The Personal History of David Copperfield

Everyone is on top form in Armando Iannucci's joyous adaptation of the Dickens' classic.

Movies • 23 Jan 20

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Dense and layered, inscrutable and withholding of its essence, Long Day's Journey into Night (not to be confused with the Eugene O'Neill play of the same name) creates ever-increasing mystery

Movie Review • 28 Dec 19

Imelda Marcos - in Lauren Greenfield's film, she is 86, and engineering a return to power for the Marcos dynasty

The Kingmaker - Imelda and the 'conjugal dictatorship'

Lauren Greenfield's latest film shows how the Marcos legacy endures and is linked with current President Duterte's regime as family scion Ferdinand 'Bong Bong' Marcos campaigns in the Philippines' Vice-Presidential elections in 2016.

Movie Reviews • 19 Dec 19

Viktoria Miroshnichenko as Iya in Beanpole

Beanpole's relentless bleakness fails to grasp

Beanpole should in theory work as a cinematic enterprise and its intense performances will certainly move those who without effort directly engage with its trauma, but it seemed over-acted and over-stylised to your reviewer.

Movies • 08 Jan 20

John Chester nursing Emma on The Biggest Little Farm in Ventura County

The Biggest Little Farm: a charming feel-good doc

Friends told John and Molly Chester that attempting to farm in harmony with nature would be reckless, if not impossible. Nevertheless, the couple cheerfully bought a farm of effectively dead soil in Ventura County, as this charming, offbeat film documents

Film Review • 27 Nov 19

Knives Out: infantile slapstick in Agatha Christie mode

Knives Out is a trite, pale comedy that tries to be as infantile as it can be within the bounds of adult entertainment.

Movie Review • 27 Nov 19

I think I'm going back: the superb Daniel Auteuil in La Belle Époque, with Guillaume Canet, on right

La Belle Époque: an enticing daydream fantasy realised

La Belle Époque's two screenings at the IFI's recent French Film Festival sold out in advance. It's an appealing fantasy in which Daniel Auteuil's sixty-something year old cartoonist steps back to a specific day, May 16, 1974

Movies • 22 Nov 19

Like Spotlight, The Report is solid but not exceptional

Hot on the heels of the engaging satire, The Laundromat, comes The Report, another Steven Soderbergh/Scott Z Burns collaboration. However, both films could not be more different, one is a skittish farce, the other a serious film about the CIA.

Movies • 22 Nov 19

Head to Head: The great German film director Werner Herzog in one of the interviews for Meeting Gorbachev

Herzog's Meeting Gorbachev - the triumph of failure

The German film-maker Werner Herzog met Mikhail Gorbachev on three occasions to speak to him about his life, notably the period when he was General Secretary of the Communist party, attempting to reform Russia and its place in the world

Movies • 06 Nov 19

By the Grace of God: disquieting drama from France

By the Grace of God: a French clerical sex scandal

Disquieting to watch, and based on real events, By the Grace of God recreates the explosive fallout in France in 2015 and 2016 when abusers banded together to confront a French priest and also to question church silence about his crimes

Film Review • 24 Oct 19