Entertainment | News, Reviews, Listings & Features

Roger Doyle performs Adolf Gebler, in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, the final sequence in Brian Lally's absorbing film

The Curious Works of Roger Doyle: moving and brilliant

Composer Roger Doyle has always been a maverick of musical sonorities in this country and he is more than content to be doing his own thing, as this fascinating, often moving new documentary reveals.

Movies • 24 Oct 19

No, not a Charlie's Angels remake, it's Terminator: Dark Fate

Terminator: Dark Fate is terminal boredom

Arnie and no one else either can rescue us from the nightmare that is Terminator: Dark Fate

Movies • 24 Oct 19

Juliette Binoche as Selina and Vincent Macaigne as Léonard in the charming Non-Fiction

Non-Fiction: Binoche shines in Paris book-world movie

Printed books versus e-books, love and infidelity behind the bookshelves, it's all rather topical in this charming, restrained comedy of manners featuring Juliette Binoche - and indeed everybody else - doing star turns

Movies • 11 Oct 19

Anyone for cake: Bill's cakes en route to various points in Kolkatta

Best Before Death and Bill Drummond's wacky world tour

The KLF's Bill Drummond believes that shining shoes, baking cakes, fashioning wooden beds are all artistic endeavours, so much so that he is on a 12-year tour of the world - 12 cities, 12 countries, the so-called 25 Paintings Tour. Is it art? You decide

Movies • 11 Oct 19

Bleak outlook on the seal hunt: the permafrost is melting and a village is under serious threat in Losing Alaska

Losing Alaska: a telling document for our times

Irish director Tom Burke's Losing Alaska is a telling document for our times, an absorbing account of how one Alaskan community of some 375 souls suffers the impact of global warming as rising water levels threaten their very existence.

Movies • 01 Oct 19

Family summit - Two sons and their families gather as mother is shielded from the truth in The Farewell

The Farewell: Dealing with a China family crisis

Made to get the Oscars in its sights, with dialogue in English and Mandarin Chinese, The Farewell is a heart-warming tale about cultural dislocation which has indeed got people talking about it in advance of the 2020 Academy Awards.

Movie Reviews • 26 Sep 19

Growing up in Aleppo: Sama of the title holds a banner bearing a pathetic message

For Sama

Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts' deeply moving film records with unnerving intimacy the siege of Aleppo in 2016. The film may leave you feeling inert in the face of human evil, or quietly raging against the dying of Aleppo's light

Movie Review • 19 Sep 19

The Souvenir mines an elegiac 1980s London seam

A young film student begins a relationship with a British Foreign Office man with rocky results in Joanna Hogg's absorbing film, which works in large part on improvisatory dialogue.

Movies • 28 Aug 19

Dripping lead-hot badness: John Cusack as Dutch, serial killer with impunity

Never Grow Old: John Cusack plays evil incarnate

Black as pitch, Never Grow Old is a convincing thriller set in 1849 in an American settlement ruled over by a psychopathic thug, played with consummate, unadulterated evil by John Cusack.

Movie Review • 22 Aug 19

Asier Etzeandia and Antonio Banderas in Pain and Glory

Pain and Glory shows Almodóvar at his finest

Almodóvar's 21st feature, Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria) is rich with reflective passages and profound encounters, mediated through brilliant cinematography and enhanced by a shimmering score from Alberto Iglesias.

Movies • 27 Aug 19

Denny Swift (Milo Ventimiglia) with his unusually reflective dog, Enzo

The Art of Racing in the Rain - old-fashioned weepie

This old-fashioned weepie spends perhaps too much time being morbid but then again what weepie doesn't? Ultimately, there is redemption of a kind mediated through the gnarled wisdom of the dog narrator

Movies • 08 Aug 19

Israeli border protests in Gaza make for tense scenes in Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell's brilliant film

Gaza: moving stories from the beleaguered strip of land

The Egyptian and Israeli borders are closed, the fishing limit is a meager 3 km and young people in the prime of their lives cannot realize their aspirations. Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell's captivating film shows the harsh reality of life in Gaza.

Film Review • 08 Aug 19

Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen on Hydra (Picture Aviva Layton)

Review: Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love

Marianne Ihlen, a Norwegian woman, was a constant presence throughout the singer Leonard Cohen's life. Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love documents their relationship evenly and sensitively.

Film Review • 23 Jul 19

Holliday Grainge as Lydia and Anna Paquin as Dr Jean Markham in Tell It To The Bees, an over-egged melodrama.

Tell It To The Bees should have told less

Director Annabel Jankel should have taken the kitchen sink out of Tell it to the Bees, because all the pots and pans have been truly thrown at it. What might have been, in more capable hands, an indie gem is instead a melodramatic TV movie.

Film Review • 18 Jul 19

Bannon plots another move between popcorn and avocado and spinach shakes

The Brink - a year in the life of Steve Bannon

The Brink follows former White House strategist Steve Bannon through the 2018 US midterm elections, and the film also covers his attempts to mobilise far-right European parties for the May 2019 parliamentary elections.

Movie Review • 12 Jul 19

Sebastian Koch plays an SS stage baddie with cold steel in Never Look Away

Never Look Away - art and love in a divided Germany

Never Look Away (Werk ohne Autor) runs to over three hours and is a reasonably engaging human story but it is overly-long and flawed. The best thing in it is the enthralling stage baddie, the SS doctor, Professor Seeband.

Film Review • 08 Jul 19

Against the bias: Roy Halston Frowick, in time he would be simply Halston, was adored for his way with Chinese silk

Halston: the tarnished legacy is still in fashion

Halston was one of that rare breed, a one-name icon who lit up American fashion in the 1970s and 1980s before it all went tear-shaped. Or should that be pear-shaped.

Movie Reviews • 07 Jun 19

Woman of destiny: Juli Jakab as the orphan Írisz trying to find her brother in Budapest

Sunset and the Austro-Hungarian Empire's anarchic end

A young woman arrives at an ultra chic millinery emporium in Budapest claiming she is the daughter of the former owners before inveigling her way into a murky, anarchic scene in the final days of the Austro-Hungarian empire in László Nemes' bold new film

Movies • 30 May 19

The cabaret singer Lola and Herr Professor in The Blue Angel

The Blue Angel: von Sternberg's classic reissued at IFI

Josef von Sternberg's 1930 classic, Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) - which stars the late Marlene Dietrich in her breakthrough role - demonstrates how a loner professor's fatal attraction to the showgirl Lola ruins his very existence.

Movie Review • 29 May 19

Demian Hernández as Sofía in Too Late to Die Young

Too Late to Die Young: doomed innocence in 1990s Chile

Nervy restlessness and the anticipation of doomed innocence shadows the brilliant Too Late to Die Young (Tarde Para Morir Joven) which is set in a commune in the hills above the capital Santiago in 1990s Chile.

Movie Review • 22 May 19

Woman at War fails to achieve victory

A woman on an anarchic mission to destroy the electric power supply in Iceland is also faced with the prospect of an adoption coming through. She is betwixt and between, like the film itself, which lies somewhere between eco-protest and absurdist drama

Movie Review • 02 May 19

Donbass: 13 snapshots from Ukraine in conflict

Donbass is in effect a series of 13 fictional snapshots, with a screenplay from writer-director Sergei Loznitsa, based around real amateur footage from the beleaguered area in Eastern Ukraine.

Film Review • 04 May 19

Toni Servillo as Silvio Berlusconi in Loro: fizz and effervescence

Loro is a high jinks treatment of dark materials

Paolo Sorrentino's latest film, Loro, plays fast and loose, painting the Berlusconi years in garish shades of outlandish mayhem and crazed decadence

Movies • 18 Apr 19

Greta will hold your interest but that's about it

Director Neil Jordan has a stab at psychodrama in his new film Greta, which is saved - and only just - by the presence of French veteran, Isabelle Huppert.

Film Review • 18 Apr 19

Wonder Park has little to wonder at

Wonder Park is visually vibrant and engaging, but the lack of tact and subtlety in dealing with the big issues is a major downfall.

Reviews • 12 Apr 19