Based on Patrick Galvin’s memoir, ‘Song for a Raggy Boy’ is set in the grey, grim surroundings of a brutal Irish reform school in 1939. While the storyline has unmistakable parallels with ‘The Magdalene Sisters’, it deserves more than to be dismissed as this year’s indictment of religious orders.Read More »
Vivienne Dick (b. 1950, Ireland) is an internationally-celebrated film-maker and artist. A key figure of the ‘No Wave’ movement in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she has gone on to develop an extraordinary body of work, which has been shown in cinemas, films festivals and art galleries around the world.Read More »
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A young woman befriends a lonely widow who’s harboring a dark and deadly agenda toward her.
Director Neil Jordan’s horror drama features Isabelle Huppert and Chloë Grace Moretz. The latter plays a cheerful teenager who returns a handbag to an eccentric, lonely, and seemingly maternal French piano teacher who eventually proves to be a sinister, dangerous, and duplicitous character.Read More »
Synopsis: Phantom Islands is an experimental film that exists at the boundary of documentary and fiction. It follows a couple adrift and disoriented in the stunning landscape of Ireland’s islands. Yet this deliberately melodramatic romance is constantly questioned by a provocative cinematic approach that ultimately results in a hypnotic and visceral inquiry into the very possibility of documentary objectivity.Read More »
Icarus Films wrote:
Rich in emotional images, often tender but more often terrifying, The Patriot Game tells the story of the long and bitter battle for Northern Ireland.
The film’s introduction covers Ireland’s history from British colonization to the territory’s division in 1922. The Patriot Game then details the events of the decade that began in 1968. Through powerful portraits of rebellion and eyewitness accounts of killings and such massacres as the infamous “Bloody Sunday,” the film shows the IRA at work – much of it filmed clandestinely – as they argue their cause which, in this country and in most of the world, has gone unheard.Read More »
A young woman sits down in a chair. Only her mouth is visible as she begins to speak at a rapid clip, describing events that she insists did not really happen to her.Read More »
After a stroke leaves her husband mentally disabled and fundamentally changed, spirited Irish housewife Vanetia struggles to keep her family together in the wake of tragedy. A research grant from American doctor Ted Fielding, interested in documenting the family’s recovery process, allows them to get by. Though Vanetia initially resents living under Ted’s microscope, she soon finds comfort in his calming presence, while Ted responds to Vanetia’s dynamic, unpredictable personality.Read More »
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A man’s coerced confession to an I.R.A. bombing he did not commit results in the imprisonment of his father as well. An English lawyer fights to free them.
Roger Ebert wrote:
The Guildford Four were framed; there seems to be no doubt about that. A feckless young Irishman named Gerry Conlon and three others were charged by the British police with being the IRA terrorists who bombed a pub in Guildford, England, in 1974, and a year later they were convicted and sentenced to life.
But great doubts grew up about their guilt, it was proven that evidence in their favor had been withheld, and in 1989 their convictions were overturned.Read More »
On the fringes of Dublin two children, Kylie and Dylan, live in a suburban housing estate devoid of life, colour and the prospect of escape. Kylie lives with five other siblings and her overworked mother. Next door, Dylan lives in the shadow of an alcoholic father and the memory of an elder brother who ran away from home two years earlier.
After a violent altercation with his father, Dylan runs away from home and Kylie decides to go with him. Together they make their way to the magical night time lights of inner city Dublin, to search for Dylan’s brother, and in the hope of starting a new life.Read More »