Earlier this year, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger, travelled back to his home in Bavaria to visit his ailing older brother, shortly before the latter died. It was an onerous and poignant journey and he contacted shingles on his return. While intellectually alert, at 93 years of age, he is inevitably frail. Indeed, […]
Directed by Christopher Nolan. Script by Christopher Nolan. Starring John David Washington; Robert Pattinson; Elizabeth Debicki; Dimple Kapadia; Michael Caine; Kenneth Branagh. Running time 150 minutes. Rotten Tomatoes 76%. You thought diving into the concept of layered dreams was hard to follow in Christopher Nolan’s Inception? Or perhaps it was the apparently plausible yet highly theoretical physics of Interstellar that cooked your bacon. Well, none of these […]
Director Lulu Wang reflects on family ties, caring for an ageing population, and the clash between East and West The other night my husband and I watched the movie The Farewell. We picked it out randomly, but it turns out we are a little behind. Upon further research, the 2019 film comes highly recommended by […]
Right from the get-go, I have to admit that Planet of the Humans, a documentary about the environmental movement produced by Michael Moore, is unfair, very unfair. And unkind, too, very unkind, to Al Gore. Alas. But as the Sierra Club might have said, you can’t produce clean, green biomass energy without levelling forests. Planet of […]
My grandmother, Esther Hannon, had two heroes other than Mattie my namesake granddad who was from Tipperary and whose own history remains a mystery. We are not closely related to the most famous Treacy who was from the football part of the county. She was a Dub going back generations, although her own mother, a […]
I was reluctant to see Greta Gerwig’s film production of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Hints of overplayed feminism permeated reviews, and surely no one could play a better Jo than Katharine Hepburn. I was glad I did. Gerwig’s original film adaptation brought this children’s classic to life in ways earlier movie versions did not. Those who […]
With the release of “The Rise of Skywalker”, last weekend, there have now been nine “Star Wars” movies. And with the saga coming to an end, without delivering any spoilers for the latest and last film, we can now say one thing, definitively: Palpatine, Darth Sidious, Emperor of the Galaxy, was the good guy, all […]
What to say about Unplanned? Admittedly I went in expecting to like it, but that did not prepare me for the film’s exceptional emotional power, one of a fairly small number of films that have brought tears to my eyes. Yet you may not have heard of it. To say it does not appear to […]