In the violent prologue, a ski-masked commando team of animal-rights activists storms the Cambridge Primate Research Center to liberate the experimental chimps, heedless of the attendant's warnings ("You've no idea!") that the chimps have been "infected" with rage. Sure enough, the chimps do not exactly embrace their liberators. Twenty-eight days …
Glenn Close, looking quite small, revives a role she did to off-Broadway acclaim 30 years earlier. Albert, a parched, remote, miserly, desexed “male” butler, is really a woman. His life at a Dublin hotel is mediocre, but Close achieves a sad, stricken pathos. She almost loses the film to Janet …
If the Nazis had invented Twitter, we wouldn’t have found ourselves in the titular predicament. After news that their only son was killed in battle, a German factory mechanic (Brendan Gleeson) and his wife (Emma Thompson) mount a grassroots campaign to take down the Third Reich, one epistle at a …
Set on a remote island off the west coast of Ireland, lifelong friends Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson) find themselves at an impasse when Colm unexpectedly puts an end to their friendship. A stunned Pádraic, aided by his sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon) and troubled young islander Dominic (Barry …
Computer-animated comic-book transcription of the unloved epic poem of the 8th Century. Director Robert Zemeckis goes even further with the motion-capture technique of The Polar Express, staking out the borderland between live action and cartoon, and throwing in 3-D to boot. Ray Winstone, voicing the dragon-slaying hero, has been prettified …
Odyssey of a transvestite, self-christened Saint Kitten, from postwar Irish Catholic orphanhood to Swinging London in the Sixties and on through the Disco Daze into the Thatcher era. Cillian Murphy, speaking at the breathy top of his range, is so obnoxiously overconfident, dauntless, irrepressible, etc., as to not only renounce …
Calvary presents the viewer with a very particular week in the life of a small-town priest in modern Ireland. Father James — played with thickened, toughened, but still lively and sharp-witted humanity by Brendan Gleeson — labors, as we all do, under a sentence of death. The difference in his …
The hardships and heartache of the American Civil War, cushioned in the plushness of the production: the crane-happy camera, the spendthrift special effects, the "painterly" washes of color and "dynamic" compositions, the visual poetry and bombast, the chiselled and sanded faces of the A-list romantic leads, Nicole Kidman (with her …
Inflammatory cop drama set against a backdrop of the well-documented racism in the LAPD. It begins, indelicately enough, with the infamous Rodney King tape, and the bulk of the action takes place while awaiting the verdict in the Simi Valley trial of the arresting officers. (The conclusion of the action …
Martin Scorsese's long-delayed, and just plain long, survey of Irish gangs in lower Manhattan during the time of the Civil War, Boss Tweed, and all that, beginning and ending in major blood baths, with minor blood rinses and sloshes in between. (It's not hard to see why the internecine discord …
John Boorman's underworld drama in old-style black-and-white (Seamus Deasy, cinematographer), mustering a wide range of grays on a wide screen, with subtle gradations and occasional spots of harsh glare on the polished surface. The title figure is the real-life Dublin crime boss Martin Cahill (we learn to say it CAH-hill, …
An Irish fable about how much joy and satisfaction an Irishman takes in a hard day's work. How much? So much that a man (Brendan Gleeson, looking beardy) will spin lies in every direction just to punch a clock: to the oil company he needs to choose his town for …
Topical war film feeds off and into the widespread cynicism, which is to say the widespread enlightenment, as to the motives behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Matt Damon, maturing into an actor of spartan economy and vigilant interiority, plays the army officer charged with running down the …
Brendan Gleeson dominates as Irish country cop Gerry, a smart slob who loves whoring, drinking, shopping guns, and making funny quips. Like most of the Gaelic rustics, he is hip to American films and music, and in a mildly racist way, Gerry welcomes the stiffly formal FBI man — played …