Set in Eden, a fictional town in the Karoo, Tannie Maria, played by Maria Doyle Kennedy (THE COMMITMENTS, THE TUDORS, DEXTER, OUTLANDER and ORPHAN BLACK) is renowned for her delicious food, the recipes of which she shares in her column in the local newspaper, The Gazette. When the cash-strapped publication decides to axe her column in favour of an Agony Aunt column, Tannie Maria volunteers to do it.
Reincarnation isn’t necessarily a scary prospect, but HERE BEFORE flirts with horror movie conventions as it establishes the relationship between Laura (Andrea Riseborough) and her new young neighbour, Megan (Niamh Dornan). Initially charmed by Megan’s offbeat personality when her family move in next door in a quiet suburban estate in Northern Ireland, Laura is shocked when Megan begins alluding to intimate details she couldn’t possibly know about Josie, Laura’s daughter, who died some years previously.
Produced by Dublin-based Element Pictures, THE SOUVENIR PT2 is director Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical drama, in which a young film-maker finds her creative path after a doomed love affair. In this flipside second instalment of Hogg’s most personal and surprisingly most accessible work, the word “souvenir” takes on a rather more metatextual meaning. This time the film itself becomes a kind of cinematic keepsake, a memory of a memory (or a dream of a dream?) set in the aftermath of Julie’s relationship with the heroin-addicted Anthony.
In NOTHING COMPARES, Kathryn Ferguson’s incisive and poignant documentary about the life and career of Sinéad O’Connor, we see the image that was chosen in 1987 for the cover of O’Connor’s first album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” made when she was 20 years old and pregnant: an extraordinary photograph of Sinéad in mid-scream. O’Connor has made seven albums since then and toured extensively, but in terms of the fame by which the pop stratosphere defines itself, Sinéad O’Connor was a fire that went out too fast. NOTHING COMPARES makes you see it’s still burning.
It’s off-beat, it’s real, it’s funny and it brings the characters to life. The new RTE drama series, HIDDEN ASSETS, focuses on family, power and the corrosive effects of boundless greed – a story set in Co Clare, small town Ireland and the world’s diamond capital, Antwerp.
Kate Dolan’s directorial feature debut takes on the task of weaving folklore about changelings with familial struggles. In YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER horror is reframed within the confines of a quaint Irish home where terror lies within the shocking transformation Char (Hazel Doupe) witnesses in her mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken).
Charming is the right word to use, mostly because it’s Irish; fans of Edgar Wright’s SHAUN OF THE DEAD will feel right at home. Here, though, BOYS FROM COUNTY HELL’s comedy mostly comes from deadpan realism—from vampire-zombies who emerge and go for the kill, and from living characters yelling expletives who spend most of the 90 minutes fleeing chaos and bickering.
Olivia Cooke can do no wrong — even as she’s doing lots of it in her latest movie, Irish new release PIXIE, where she plays the most intriguing femme fatale to come along in many a rising moon. PIXIE is a jaunty, Tarantino-wannabe contraption, loaded with double and quadruple crosses, genre-mashing diversions and loads of idiots dying sudden, violent deaths.