The spirit of Chekhov hovers over the Irish countryside in The Last September. Director Deborah Warner and screenwriter John Banville bring a powerfully elliptical sense of inevitable loss to this film about the waning days of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Based on the 1929 novel by Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September is set on a country estate in Cork in 1920 … [Read more...] about The Last September: The Rules of Ascendancy
Film Review
Film Forum: A Late Encounter with the Enemy
Few things are sadder than a missed opportunity. The story of the San Patricios, the Irish emigrants and their comrades of other ethnic groups who fought for Mexico during the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-48, is rich and underexplored dramatic material. Complex and stirring issues of loyalty and heroism resound throughout the saga of the Saint Patrick's Battalion, which consisted … [Read more...] about Film Forum: A Late Encounter with the Enemy
Irish Eye on Hollywood
FROM AILES TO POWER Academy Award winner Russell Crowe was most recently seen on the Showtime political drama The Loudest Voice, about TV kingmaker Roger Ailes and the rise of Fox News. Now, instead of a character who enrages American Democrats, Crowe is headed home to play an Irishman who enrages Australian authorities. Crowe is slated to star in The True History of the … [Read more...] about Irish Eye on Hollywood
The Magdalene Sisters
A disturbing movie by Peter Mullan on what happened to the "wayward" women of Ireland. Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters opens ironically with a wedding scene. But it is not a happy occasion. Margaret is lured by her cousin Kevin to an upstairs room where he rapes her. Kevin is chastised, but it is Margaret who has "shamed" her family and is carted off the next morning by … [Read more...] about The Magdalene Sisters
Film Forum :
Troubles with Sunday
The epochal "Bloody Sunday" -- the massacre of thirteen unarmed Londonderry civilians by the British Army on January 30, 1972 -- is the stuff from which great drama could be drawn. The stories of the individuals caught up in the violence, the political machinations behind the scenes, the obscuring fog of lies and propaganda, and that day's transformation of Irish politics offer … [Read more...] about Film Forum :
Troubles with Sunday