Is it curtains for Ireland’s World Cup chances now that we’ve been drawn against the, on paper at least, far superior French? Also, fair dinkum to Cork hurling keeper Dónal Óg Cusack for doing the unthinkable and actually penning an interesting sports autobiography
Saint Patrick’s Athletic are now just two games away from the group stages of the Europa League. Chief executive Richard Sadlier talks the Super Saints’ chances against the mighty Steaua.
Ireland’s last-gasp Grand Slam win over Wales will go down as one of this nation’s greatest sporting achievements. It was both a much needed shot of good news for a country gripped by economic despair, and vindication for a group of players who had been tagged the ‘nearly-men’ of world rugby.
The Fall delivers a slow-starting but strong, riotous show at the Spiegeltent, performing an electrifying set that leaves little doubt that this band will still be at it many years from now.
She's the multi-platinum artist you won't read about in the tabloids. AMY MACDONALD explains how she managed to top the charts without becoming famous.
Cockney football pundit Tony Cascarino recently paid a visit to the Ballydung abode of potty-mouthed puppets Podge and Rodge. Here both sides reflect on the historic get-together.
In the wake of Steve Staunton’s sacking as Ireland manager, Eamon Dunphy welcomes Craig Fitzsimons into his Ranelagh home and offers some characteristically forthright views on the state of Irish football.
Irony-deficient Nordic rockers Turbonegro are one of the world’s most credible hardcore acts, with a fanlist that includes Queens Of The Stone Age and Therapy?
Blessed with total recall, Craig Fitzsimons relieves the most glorious Irish sporting achievements of the past 30 years – and some that we’d all rather forget.
From weirdo avant-garde art to desecrated classic album sleeves to right-wing Boer paraphernalia, there’s hardy a dull moment on the web this fortnight.
The US-led ‘War on Terror’ has officially extended its scope to east African territory. But will this make the world a safer place or merely stoke the flames of Islamic extremism?
With elections to the Dáil and the Seanad on the way, 2007 is likely to throw up a fresh generation of political contenders. Craig Fitzsimons casts an eye over some of the young guns likely to make a splash.
Louis Walsh and Bono suffer a roasting as Echo And The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch talks to Hot Press about life as an indie-pop legend and explains why he’s rock music’s answer to Frank Sinatra.
Thirty nine years ago a British soccer team won the European Cup for the first time: Glasgow Celtic veterans Billy McNeill and Tommy Gemmell look back at their triumph in Lisbon.
For the painfully shy and private Ray LaMontagne, life in the spotlight is one of almost unremitting discomfort, and yet he hopes to last as long as Willie Nelson.
Four albums in two decades may seem like a poor return, but not when the music is as gentle and wondrous as that made by The Blue Nile. Ahead of a rare live turn, frontman Paul Buchanan explains why he likes to take things slowly.
Could a serial killer be behind a rash of disappearances in Dublin and neighbouring counties over the past two decades? And might the murderer now be behind bars? Craig Fitzsimons untangles a dark and disturbing tale and wonders whether the truth of what happened will really ever become known.
The big time came knocking but Jack L said, "No thanks, I’d rather do my own thing." In a revealing interview, he explains why he’d rather be an underground star and tells of how melancholy gets him out of bed every morning.
Former Hollywood A-lister Juliette Lewis and her backing band The Licks rock without mercy throughout their third album Four On The Floor, a laboriously endurance-defying excavation of every 70s rawk-monster riff you’ve ever heard, with Juliette’s angry vocal caterwauling thrown in by way of a bonus
Year Of The Leopard – Yorkston’s third album – is an extremely downbeat collection, probably best suited to those in boozy broken-hearted 5am lamentation mode.
Are they Madchester tribute band charlatans, an even more half-baked Kula Shaker, or swaggering rock monsters from Leicester? The jury is still out in the case of The People vs Kasabian.
The missing link (ouch) between the Velvet Underground and Phil Spector, The Jesus & Mary Chain were one of the most influential and critically lauded bands of the 1980s. 20 years after Psychocandy though, Jim Reid found himself mired in serious alcohol addiction problems. Now domiciled in Devon, he looks back through the lens of newfound – but still precarious – sobriety.
Journalist STEVEN POOLE has, inspired by Orwell, written a riveting book documenting the insidious abuses of the English language perpetrated by politicians and powermongers.
Every hip indie musician is namechecking (and soundchecking) Gang Of Four these days. But there’s more to the band than scratchy guitars and funky rhythms – as guitarist Andy Gill tells us, their unique sound was forged during a time of musical innovation and political radicalism.
What sorcery is this? By now, it’s accepted that every musical sub-genre gets excavated and recycled after time has put the original article at an appropriate distance, but a full-on psychedelic folk revival?? Weren’t the punk wars fought to cleanse the Earth of beads, beards, flutes and six-minute one-chord drone jams?
Amir Khan is one of the hottest young British boxers in a generation. What makes his story especially interesting is that the Bolton Olympic silver medallist is an English Muslim child of Pakistani parents. He is due in Belfast shortly for his seventh professional encounter and, make no mistake, fight fans are in for a treat.
Until recently one of the ultimate indie cult bands, The Flaming Lips have survived the ravages of heroin, acid and a hunting trip with William Burroughs. Now, their new album At War With The Mystics finds them taking their funky psychedelia to strange new places – including the upper reaches of the charts for the first time. Could it be that their moment has finally come? Interviews: Craig Fitzsimons (now) and Peter Murphy (then). additional reporting: Stuart Clark, Ed Power and Jackie Hayden
They redefined the parameters of contemporary music, creating weird, eerie and magnificent soundscapes. Now, as they prepare to release a career retrospective, Massive Attack talk about their choice of collaborators and why they agreed to soundtrack a porn movie.
An icon of the radical left, Noam Chomsky has long been one of the fiercest critics of US foreign policy. During a rare visit to Ireland, he explains why the Bush Presidency might be the most dangerous yet.
The American interior has long influenced the music of Wilco. But frontman Jeff Tweedy, a confirmed member of liberal 'blue' US still feels deeply alienated from his nation’s conservative heartland.
The fourth series of RTÉ Two's highly-acclaimed Other Voices, presented by John Kelly, was recorded over an extraordinary eight days during the madcap run-up to Christmas, in the thoroughly invigorating coastal environs of Dingle. Hot Press reporter Craig Fitzsimons was there to soak up the phantasmagoria, as some of the hottest talent from Ireland and abroad descended on the tranquil Kerry town to make heavenly music.
Though the throng treat the night as a karaoke singalong excuse to rattle out the 20% of lyrics they’re actually acquainted with, the highs are vertigo peaks.
Robert Fisk is one of the most insightful war correspondents on the planet, his reports from Iraq and elsewhere the scourge of spindoctors, warmongers and tin-pot dictators alike. Craig Fitzsimons finds him on the frontline.
With strikingly disciplined ferocity, better melodies than the Manics, near-Teutonic efficiency and positively ballistic energy levels, it was hardly a massive shock that Franz blew the Point to shards
Lending a new meaning to the phrase ‘genre-hopping’, this atrociously-named outfit serve up a thoroughly weird, studiedly eccentric sort of neo-psychedelic stew, fusing elements of prog-rock, electronica and lightweight summertime pop into a multi-faceted concoction that defies all rational explanation
Following the publication of The Ferns Report, there is no longer any hiding the rampant extent of clerical sex abuse of children in Ireland. But in Pope Benedict II, the Roman Catholic Church is headed by a man who knows the detail of what went on – and yet has done nothing to redress it.
Following the publication of The Ferns Report, there is no longer any hiding the rampant extent of clerical sex abuse of children in Ireland. But in Pope Benedict II, the Roman Catholic Church is headed by a man who knows the detail of what went on – and yet has done nothing to redress it.
Bloodied but unbowed by press smears, Scottish socialist firebrand George Galloway is one of the most vocal anti-war politicians in Britian. In a characteristically frank interview he discusses Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Resepect, and why Shannon could be considered a terrorist target.
There’s enough edge on his third outing, The Trinity, to suggest he has at least an even-money chance of cutting it as a more credible latter-day incarnation of chest-beating predecessors like Shabba and Shaggy.
Elevator is safer-sounding, less adventurous and less exciting than their last blast Make Up The Breakdown, an evolution possibly not unrelated to their being snapped up by a major label. The intimidating energy level remains undiminished, and there still isn’t a note out of place - all that’s missing is anything resembling a sharp edge. At its worst, the frantic cramming of hooks and harmony vocals can create a faintly twee, sugary effect, conjuring spectres of an amped-up They Might Be Giants. At its best, there’s more than enough bite and balls in the guitar work to render such objections irrelevant.
Spoken of in hushed, reverential tones by an entire generation of aspiring guitarslingers, QOTSA are modern-day six-string gods, utterly fluent in post-Zep/Hendrix metal, and heavily informed by a certain strain of early-‘90s stoner rock (Soundgarden, Alice in Chains) though without the glum, humourless self-absorption that made most of the latter ilk such a charmless proposition.
The siege of Derry was a pivotal moment in Irish history. But contrary to popular opinion, it was fundamentally about land and not religion, says Carlo Gebler. Photography by Cathal Dawson.
The only serious present-day heir to sainted founding fathers DMC and NWA, ex-crack dealer 50 Cent became an overnight hip-hop Godhead with his beyond-phenomenal debut Get Rich or Die Tryin’, an echoing, booming, bloodthirsty beast saturated with paranoia, claustrophobia and general violent vibes. It sold ten million-plus copies, and Eminem aside, the spliff-toting kids in my less-than-Bronxlike suburb scarcely listen to anybody else.
Roots’ two previous albums have been credited with influencing everyone from The Streets to Dizzee Rascal, but Awfully Deep is easily his most consistently worthwhile offering yet
Aside from a slew of wasted lives, a sad but inescapable consequence of the staggeringly high mortality rates that accompany most worthwhile rock’n’roll voyages is the fact that wet-eared young whippersnappers in their early twenties feel emboldened to undertake ambitious, epic statements about love and death.
A polished little diamond, if a little on the sugar-heavy side, The Trial Of The Century (the FK’s third) showcases a band who’ve stumbled across a distinctive and engaging sound of their own, although they seem no more inclined to take chances with it than The Charlatans ever were: it’s all uptempo, lush, lilting, sweeping aural confectionery which frequently sounds extremely pretty.
Given that many of rock’s most universally revered icons could at least partially be filed under ‘folk music’ – Dylan, Cohen, Nick Drake - it’s striking how rarely the genre attains genuine crossover appeal among those who’d gleefully hunt down reggae or blues obscurities.
There hasn’t been a debut this ominous and arresting from sleepy Lincolnshire since a radiant young Margaret Thatcher first addressed the Tory conference, and we all know how that one ended up.
The Tuscan town of Siena –at least until its tiny football team gatecrashed Serie A last year – has for several centuries been chiefly renowned (if at all) as the setting for an annual 80-second horse race known as the Palio
Craig Fitzsimons talks to David Gleeson, director of Cowboys & Angels, another exciting addition to the growning canon of unapologetically youthful and exuberent contemporary Irish movies
An influential and respected figure in evolutionary terms, though never stratospherically successful, the good Doctor (still) specialises in a heady, ebullient, high-spirited brew of jazz, soul and piano-based Southern boogie-woogie.
With even the comparatively tranquil Euro 2004 marred by trouble on the Algarve, the issue of football hooliganism remains a live one. Now, one of its definitive texts has made it to the big screen. Craig Fitzsimons meets the men – and learns about the hard men – behind The Football Factory
It’s not revolutionary or groundbreaking stuff by garage standards, but it’s an impressive enough statement of intent from potentially Peckham’s finest export since the family Trotter.
Continuing the Coen brothers’ ongoing flirtation with something resembling the ‘mainstream’, this wholly unexpected remake of Alexander Mackendrick’s 1955 screwball comedy The Ladykillers is a real curiosity.
The Cooler’s pace never relents throughout, which keeps it lively enough to mitigate the bombardment of gangster-flick clichés that disfigure the proceedings. There’s certainly no earthly reason to see it twice, but for unfussy devotees of the genre, this might do the trick.
Basque Ball is an endlessly fascinating document, of far wider potential appeal than to political-geography obsessives. For the latter, it’s an absolute feast.
It starts to seem as if every fresh new fortnight brings further filmic evidence of horrific degradation among the (extremely sizeable) Brazilian underclass – Bus 174 has only just left our screens, while City of God will remain an ultra-vivid memory in the minds of all who witnessed it. In its own way, Carandiru is more impressive than either.
A mind-bogglingly sentimental ‘feelgood’ affair, in accordance with all the traditions of American sports movies, Radio stars Ed Harris (easily the film’s strongest link) as the grizzled old head coach of a high-school American-football team, way down in the deep heart of Southern redneck country.
Brazilian society may well be the most chaotic, violent and polarised on earth outside the USA, as startlingly reflected in last year’s eye-opening City Of God, and this remarkable documentary also offers much to raise the blood pressure.
This year’s Hollywood hymn to tainted hippy-era rock’n’roll excess – think Boogie Nights meets Drugstore Cowboy – the overblown but highly engrossing Wonderland provides an unexpectedly riveting memorial to the life and times of legendary ’60s and ’70s porn-star John Holmes.
With his first film The Station Agent, Tom McCarthy has fashioned a magnetic fable of Fin, the new-dwarf-in-town, which has invited comparison with Ford and Cassavetes.
With his first film The Station Agent, Tom McCarthy has fashioned a magnetic fable of Fin, the new-dwarf-in-town, which has invited comparison with Ford and Cassavetes.
Sacreligious even by the standards Hollywood insists on applying to children’s literature, the utterly excruciating C**t In The Hat really should motivate the late Dr.Seuss’s estate to take out a barring order against anyone who would dare fuck with his creations
Sacreligious even by the standards Hollywood insists on applying to children’s literature, the utterly excruciating C**t In The Hat really should motivate the late Dr.Seuss’s estate to take out a barring order against anyone who would dare fuck with his creations
One of those movies whose title instantly reveals everything there is to know about it – in the manner of Volcano, Violent Cop or Parisian Sex Kittens – the tiresome though accidentally amusing Under The Tuscan Sun serves up a typically bland, impeccably picturesque slice of scenic Europudding for those who lapped up such laxative-smooth delights as Malena, Tea With Mussolini and The Talented Mr Ripley.
The violent life and death of the Florida prostitute Aileen Wuornos, who was executed in 2002 for a string of murders, is the subject matter of the debut film feature monster by Patty Jenkins. Craig Fitzsimons talks to the writer-director about the controversial, Oscar-winning movie
For those of you with blissful enough lives to be unaware of his existence, The Rock (lest we forget, his real name is Dwayne Johnson) is the biggest phenomenon by far in the lunatic world of American professional wrestling – a standing which should ideally equip him for a career in the movies, given that wrestling itself is entirely a (somewhat heightened) form of behaviourist acting.
On the face of it, this might sound like one of the most ill-advised cinematic enterprises since Charlie’s Angels were resurrected: nobody, surely, looks back on the late-’70s cop-show Starsky & Hutch with anything fonder than a mildly amused, embarrassed benevolence.
Possibly this year’s left-field arthouse sleeper hit, Northfork is the third offering to date from twin brothers Michael and Mark Polish, a pair of sibling directors whose lofty ambitions are already evident from their impressive stylistic range, as evinced by the acclaimed debut Twin Falls Idaho, a truly weird piece of work in which they starred as conjoined twins.
Possibly this year’s left-field arthouse sleeper hit, Northfork is the third offering to date from twin brothers Michael and Mark Polish, a pair of sibling directors whose lofty ambitions are already evident from their impressive stylistic range, as evinced by the acclaimed debut Twin Falls Idaho.
John McCarthy’s experiences as a hostage of Islamic fundamentalists in the late ’80s form the basis of a powerful new film, Blind Flight. McCarthy here reflects on his period in captivity and discusses his ongoing growth as a writer with Craig Fitzsimons.
Adapted from Andre Dubus III’s best-selling novel, this (extremely) slow-paced affair is a well-crafted and suspenseful thriller by mainstream Hollywood standards, though it’s preposterously overcooked and could certainly be accused of taking its time at a whopping 124 minutes.
You might remember Aileen Wuornos (legendarily misnamed ‘the world’s first female serial killer’) – a lower-end-of-the-market prostitute with an extremely troubled background, whose loathing of males led her to kill a series of ill-starred punters in the early ’90s before the law caught up with her. She languished in Death Row for the guts of a decade before being executed in October 2002, but from beyond the grave, Wuornos – inevitably, when you consider her crimes – has now been immortalised in a full-scale feminist-avenger biopic.
For those of you too young to remember the events it concerns, Blind Flight is a dramatisation of the captivity of hostages John McCarthy (English) and Brian Keenan (avowedly Irish) who were both seized by Islamic fundamentalists in the Lebanon back in the mid-’80s, spending several years at their majesties' pleasure before being released to huge fanfare at home, having been subjected to just about every deprivation and brutality on Allah's earth.
Undoubtedly the most accomplished film-maker in Quebec – not that there’s vast competition for that accolade – Denys Arcand’s output is always worth a look, though you need to go back to 1990’s gob-smackingly pretentious but hugely entertaining Jesus Of Montreal to find the last time one of Arcand’s films commanded significant international attention.
Afghanistan hasn’t contributed massively to the global cinematic canon in recent years, a state of affairs not really helped when those raving liberals in the Taliban came to power and burnt all existing prints.
Eddie Murphy’s career is widely perceived to have been on some kind of upward curve of late – The Nutty Professor and Dr.Dolittle having done the box-office biz in some style – and though unlikely to ever come within sniffing distance of an Oscar, his good name still seems to pack out the ‘plexes effortlessly enough.
He may have already seated his place in movie history with searing performances in the likes of Scarface and Dog Day Afternoon, but legendary screen icon Al Pacino remains keen to seek out fresh challenges. Hotpress caught up with Pacino to discuss his role in People I Know, the gritty New York thriller which sees the actor go back to his lo-fi indie roots.
While more enlightened critics have noted that Dogville has important points to make about exploitation, degredation, self-righteousness and self-serving iniquity, Moviehouse must urge caution about whether such treasures are really worth the three-hour wait.
Based on the true-life story of British mountaineer Joe Simpson, who went merrily climbing in the Peruvian Andes in 1985 with his mate Simon Yates, Touching The Void is another profoundly hair-raising documentary from the accomplished Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin MacDonald (One Day In September).
Latest in the bewilderingly long line of generally worthless horror movies 2003 has had to offer, The Dead End isn’t nearly as spectacularly bad as most of the others but despite its impressive atmospherics and sense of claustrophobia, it has neither the originality nor the suspense necessary to overcome its obvious limitations.
Latest in the bewilderingly long line of generally worthless horror movies 2003 has had to offer, The Dead End isn’t nearly as spectacularly bad as most of the others but despite its impressive atmospherics and sense of claustrophobia, it has neither the originality nor the suspense necessary to overcome its obvious limitations.
A Scottish-based black comedy – with a title like that, it would have to be fairly black – directed by Denmark’s Lone Scherfrig, the mordantly funny if unremarkable Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself stars up-and-coming Britpacker Jamie Sives (a veteran of Vinnie Jones’ unwatchable Mean Machine) as the suicidal sad sack of the title.
A Scottish-based black comedy – with a title like that, it would have to be fairly black – directed by Denmark’s Lone Scherfrig, the mordantly funny if unremarkable Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself stars up-and-coming Britpacker Jamie Sives (a veteran of Vinnie Jones’ unwatchable Mean Machine) as the suicidal sad sack of the title.
Misanthropic, mischievous but keenly-observed battle epics based around the war of the sexes are LaBute’s speciality, and his latest outing The Shape of Things fits the bill perfectly.
For those who missed out first time round, Paths Of Freedom was a reasonably successful RTE series (from the team who also brought you Fergus’ Wedding).
Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting Hill man Richard Curtis is back with another film that has heartstrings and funnybones in its sights. But is Love Actually any good? Craig Fitzsimons and Tara Brady endeavour to find out
Having scored critical and commercial success – not to mention putting Irish cinema on the map with the likes of My Left Foot and In The Name Of The Father – Jim Sheridan has now mined his own past for in America, a haunting remembrance of the film-maker’s time as a struggling immigrant on the streets of New York.
A grim and miserable tale of relentless brutality, rape and buggery in an Irish industrial school, Song For A Raggy Boy was never likely to be a bucket of belly-laughs.
Following the lukewarm reception accorded Jackie Brown six years ago, Quentin Tarantino reached a crossroads in his career. now, following a prolonged retreat from the media spotlight, a rumoured struggle with writer’s block and his break-up with Mira Sorvino, the most influential film-maker of the nineties has made a stunning return to form with the explosive samurai thriller, Kill Bill. Craig Fitzsimons travelled to london to meet the director and discuss the film he describes as “the movie of my geek boy dreams.”
Craig Fitzsimons talks to oscar-winning director Kevin McDonald about his gripping new docu-drama touching the void, chosen to open this year’s stranger than fiction festival at the IFI.
Subtle and quietly uplifting, Matchstick Men never threatens to materialise into a classic, but easily knocks the crap out of like-minded recent efforts like Confidence. Cautiously recommended.
Since the world is clearly in desperately burning need of another Heartwarming Feelgood It’s-Grim-Oop-North triumph-over-adversity crowdpleaser, it is about to be treated to one. Calendar Girls is already racking up comparisons to 1997’s astonishingly over-rated The Full Monty
What A Girl Wants suffers from a typically unpleasant chick-flick worldview, purporting to condemn snobbery while unconsciously embracing it at every single turn.
En route, there’s some hair-raising swordplay, quite a few stirring skirmishes, passages of mildly tiresome buddy-movie convention, and your time-honoured posh girl-falls-for-devilish rogue scenario.
He’s back – and despite justifiable fears about young Arnold Schwarzenegger’s increasing physical decrepitude, the merciless leather-clad killing machine still kicks ass
Goodbye Lenin’s view of the old East Germany is so rose-tinted as to be delusional but no-one should let that spoil their appreciation of what must be one of the sweetest, most warm-hearted comedies Euro-cinema has ever had to offer.
Spectacularly imposing in size and scale, the green ball of primal rage is easily the most memorable creation of its kind in cinematic history, and there’s immense pleasure on offer as he trashes man, beast and plane with fly-swat ease throughout an inordinately enjoyable face-off finale.
Evidently not scripted with Oscar glory in mind, Full Throttle is a frivolous, harmless and profoundly lightweight piece of work chiefly recommended to horny 15-year-old boys
It’s a pleasure to report that Guerin’s hair-raising story has finally been committed to celluloid in a manner that does the tale justice, and the result is a gripping and supremely-acted piece of work.
The three leading ladies, display acceptable comic timing and gymnastic prowess, and while the film is undeniably dumb and nonsensical, it clearly has no pretensions otherwise.
Far too convoluted for its own good, this military whodunnit’s overheated plot consists of so many daft twists and turns, the film rapidly ceases to make any sense.
Though Vin Diesel is absent, 2 Fast 2 Furious otherwise slavishly and faithfully reheats the formula that worked wonders first time out: a fleet of supremely shiny, spankingly expensive great big colourful cars
The pair’s comic sparring is decent enough in view of what they’re given, but an atrocious sub-soap opera script, replete with phrases like ‘anger monkeys’ and ‘fury fighters’, does its level-best to drill holes in the audience’s collective head.
Cradle 2 The Grave, though likeable enough, is a thoroughly forgettable straight-to-video affair that wlll hardly bestow household-name status on anyone invoved
A spectacular trip up Steven Soderberg’s own arse, the unbelievably pretentious Full Frontal might go some way to erode the enormous, if inflated, credibility his genre-hopping output has so far gained him.
The Seymour-Hoffman/Paquin exchanges border on the uncomfortable, but Lee handles them astutely enough, and Norton’s tornado of a central performance won’t be easily forgotten.
It takes over an hour for the movie to really get going in [the special effects] department, but it’s certainly worth the wait, with a bombardment of genuinely awe-inspiring SEs that more than fulfil the hype.
Schneider’s general strategy is to aim as far below the lowest common denominator as humanly possible, while extracting mild physical-comedy mileage from his scrawny physique and range of preposterously dweeby facial expressions.
The premise, though uninspired, could at least have served as the basis for a mildly diverting enterprise, but there’s just nothing by way of drama or suspense on offer, while even the guts-and-gore quotient falls far short of what genre devotees have a right to expect.
If you’re going to follow up a hit like East Is East, best to do it in style – by turning to Blackpool, darts and morris dancing. Damien O’Donnell tells Craig Fitzsimons about his “uncool” new movie
Trapped bears all the signs of having been scripted by an illiterate chimp on ketamine, while the awfulness of the acting defies conception or description.
Award-winning shorts director Robert Quinn and actor Andrew Scott on their new movie, Dead Bodies, a highly touted comedy-thriller set in contemporary Dublin
Though never as epic or memorable as the original, Jungle Book 2 is far from the act of total sacrilege that you might have feared, and there’s little justifiable reason for giving this a miss.
Commitments director Alan Parker and actress Laura Linney on their new movie, The Life Of David Gale, which explores the murky territory of the death penalty.
Moonlight Mile goes some way to restore sympathy, largely in part to Gyllenhaal’s engaging and sympathetic central performance, with flashes of the script offering a loving and clear-eyed examination of loyalty and loss.
Ice Cube continues his surprisingly impressive acting career with this likeable, lightweight, totally inconsequential chronicle of the trials and tribulations that attend his ownership of an inner-city Chicago barbershop.
Absolutely pathetic on any number of levels, there is still a playfully awful je ne sais quoi about the film, which somehow compels you to take it to your heart.
Primarily down to an uncomfortably slow and sedate pace, Adaptation is never for one moment as buzzy, hypnotic or intriguing as Malkovich, and the entire project frequently stumbling upon the assumption that the audience is genuinely ‘in’ on every imponderable.
Primarily down to an uncomfortably slow and sedate pace, Adaptation is never for one moment as buzzy, hypnotic or intriguing as Malkovich, and the entire project frequently stumbling upon the assumption that the audience is genuinely ‘in’ on every imponderable.
Analyze That will probably find a receptive enough audience among those who lap up The Sopranos and related shtick: the idea of a third installment, though, is genuinely terrifying.
Loud, buzzy, fast-moving and colourful – if more than a little preposterous – Daredevil compares favourably with other recent comic-book spinoffs such as SpiderMan and X-Men.
Interrogation scenes of Spanish Inquisition severity provide the light entertainment in a staggeringly bleak and brutal (if generic and utterly preposterous) outing, which careers towards a ridiculous but suitably hair-raising conclusion at near-breakneck pace without pausing for breath.
The problem with Catch Me if You Can’s isn’t the acting, the script or anything inherent: its fluffy crowd-pleasing nature is OK in itself, but as is so often the case, it seems to have given rise to an urge to spell out every single plot-point and verbal nuance in excruciating retard-friendly detail.
You may think of her as a much-loved veteran of sit-com television, but with a role in Roman Polanski’s powerful new holocaust movie to her credit, Maureen Lipman offers passionate and often controversial views on history, the hounding of Matthew Kelly and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
No one in their right mind can deny that he’s a spellbinding filmmaker, a truth arguably never more vividly demonstrated than in The Pianist, Polanski’s hugely elegant and beautifully haunting Holocaust memoir.
The creator of Bowling For Columbine, this year’s most devastating big screen documentary, shoots from the hip on violence, gun control, Charlton Heston, George Bush, satire and the Canadian solution to an American problem
The Dancer Upstairs makes for highly engaging viewing, and though its pace is slow and stately enough to torpedo all notions of Malkovich suddenly metamorphosising into the next George Lucas, it’s a thoughtful and rewarding work.
It soon becomes apparent very early on that Death Watch, perhaps a fine idea in the first place, flounders sadly without the benefit of remotely accomplished direction or a script worthy of the name.
How about we go with an action sequence type 44 here, followed by a chick in bikini shot and a snappy, sleazy one-liner as he whips his gadget out? Cool.
Filmed in a manner that its target admirers will no doubt describe as ‘sumptuous’, François Ozon’s curious French musical-cum-murder-mystery, though typically stylised and shallow, utilises its formidable cast of established Gallic screen divas to impressive effect.
The second instalment of Harry successfully repeats the same trick as last year’s Philosopher’s Stone adaptation and proves to be a zippy and charming affair, if perhaps lacking the seductive narrative pull of its literary equivalent
Never less than intriguing, Morvern is an emotionally aloof but visually impressive work, strikingly original if sparsely plotted, and possessing enough hypnotic dream-like power to excuse occasional lapses into self-indulgent pretension
Though not bellowing as maniacally as has sometimes been his wont, Pacino still brings all the subtlety of a flying brick to the proceedings, while useful co-stars such as Jay Mohr and Catherine Keener are under-deployed
The Rookie is dull and dreary beyond comprehension, and even hardcore fans of the sport are urged to consider what they’re letting themselves in for before attending
Something of a buddy movie, L & S is all about an orphaned Hawaiian girl who adopts a cute big-eyed sharp-fanged dog, who in reality is a mutant alien programmed to destroy
Mike Leigh’s latest project all or nothing continues his fascination with the everyday mundanity of working-class life, but as usual there is warmth and a genuine humour at the film’s core
Despite Loach’s justified reputation for startling realism, it’s undeniable that many of his films are as melodramatic as it’s humanly possible to get, and Sweet Sixteen is certainly no exception
As vibrant and colourful as anything the auteur has served up, and further evidence of his increasing tendency towards sedate, melancholic contemplation
Welsh actor Rhys Ifans is best known for his role as the easy-going slacker Spike in Notting Hill, but in reality he's a driven actor who's more concerned about imminent war than the state of the British film industry. But he still enjoys a pint, and yes, he did sing with the Super Furry Animals
As competent as it's wholly unmemorable, as a movie, The Importance of Being Earnest is best categorised as a solid, bogstandard British period/costume yarn, with occasional gems of wit to enliven the affair
The ornate storyline, the hypnotic use of flashback and the edgy atmospherics, all combine to create a haunting experience that borders on the disturbing
Thankfully, once you've sat through an opening hour, the film settles down to become a stylish and pacy yarn about missing nukes and sinister shadowy international neo-Nazi organisations
While it would be excessive to say it was worth the wait, Men in Black 2 still possesses enough goofy charm and (half-)wit to render it very agreeable viewing.
Easily the silliest and most lobotomised film release you will see all year, but guiltily funny for five-minute stretches, this plays exactly like its two predecessors
Endlessly talented, if erratic and compulsively experimental, Richard Linklater's latest offering might not sound all that appetising, but it's easily the finest entity of its kind since Hurlyburly
Though flawed, How Harry Became A Tree would probably qualify as the most effective example of homegrown bucolic melodrama since Neil Jordan's Butcher Boy adaptation
Daniel Lapaine and Alice Evans are the stars of The Abduction Club, a restoration romantic comedy set in Ireland. "It's like Jane Austen after having a good shag," insists Daniel
John Q.is just far too preposterous to be credible, a situation that the piss-poor script, daft plot and largely disinterested acting doesn't exactly help
Films about the Yugoslav war have tended to prove less than successful in box-office terms over here, but you would be doing yourself a diservice to overlook Danis Tanovic's tense, disquieting thriller
Attack Of The Clones turns out to be almost as awful as its predecessor, with only the occasional lightsabre fight serving to deflect attention from the demented ridiculousness of the entire enterprise
Misleadingly pitched as 'Die Hard in a POW camp' thanks to the presence of Bruce Willis, Hart's War is actually a thoughtful if undeniably plodding drama
From Dublin to Hollywood and from hanging around in Ballykissangel to hanging out with Al, Bruce and Tom, actor Colin Farrell is making the most of life as 'the next big thing'. "I'm a lucky bastard," he tells Craig Fitzsimons
Not the comic highlight of the universe's brief history - in fact, quite cheerfully crappy - there's something perversely likeable about this low-brain buddy comedy
Soulless, heartless, deafeningly loud, and polluted throughout by a hideous neo-Goth soundtrack, Queen Of The Damned is visibly aimed at the sad-and-morbid Marilyn Manson fringe of teenage tossers
A stately, highly ambitious and very impressively-photographed affair marred only by a distinct lack of pace, The Count Of Monte Cristo doesn't quite attain the epic matinee swashbuckler status it's aiming for
A documentary set in the small, snowy coastal town Berlevag, situated two hundred and fifty miles inside the Artic Circle, where a two dozen or so aging blokes in sailor suits make up an all-male choir
Set 20,000 years ago, during that breakthrough period for all things mammalian, this digital animation movie sees a small tribe of Ice Age humans come under attack from a pack of snarling sabre-toothed tigers
The Royal Tenenbaums is clever, likeable and often funny - it's by no means the life-changing masterpiece you may have been led to believe, but there's no arguing with it while it lasts
Deafeningly dramatic when required, but so attendant to subtle character details that it could be an Ang Lee film in its quieter moments, In The Bedroom unfolds at a stately, majestic pace, yet with an edgy, ominous undercurrent throughout
Latest, if by no means last, in the disgusting and apparently endless current avalanche of downright Nazi-style movies depicting the US military as saviours and protectors of the very planet they murder and plunder at will, We Were Soldiers cannot be watched without the immediate aid of a sick-bag
Undeniably powerful, ruthlessly emotive, deeply manipulative but competent in the extreme, it's the (somewhat sanitised) life-story of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash, his marriage and his recurring battles with paranoid schizophrenia
Having knocked ’em dead in America, the Oscar-nominated MONSTERS INC is ready to repeat its success here.
CRAIG FITZSIMONS meets the film’s director, PETE DOCTER
Lacking serious competition, Just Visiting might easily be the most cheerfully brain-dead movie Hollywood has churned out in several years, and this would include the output of Adam Sandler and the Farrelly brothers
A worthy and admirable, if less than high-octane biopic of esteemed author Iris Murdoch, Iris is based on her husband's account of their relationship and her eventual struggle with the debilitating effects of Alzheimer's disease.
Considering this dino-franchise has grossed in the region of $1.5billion to date, a third instalment was as inevitable as the eventual extinction of life on Earth.
As much as any actor alive, Eddie Murphy has a tendency to polarise reactions – so if you actually find that the guy’s routine genuinely tickles your funnybone, Dr. Dolittle 2 won’t disappoint.
Now that it has been seen by the whole world (and it's Uncle Bilbo) the truth can finally be revealed – Gimli was a most reluctant dwarf. John Rhys Davies explains how he overcame doubts about the book and an allergy to make-up and learned to love The Lord Of The Rings, voted movie of the year in the Hotpress Readers Poll
Dundalk-born director John Moore has produced one of the most gung-ho portrayals of the US military in recent cinema history in behind enemy lines, yet Craig Fitzsimons discovers a film-maker who finds flag-waving unacceptable
Now that it has been seen by the whole world (and its Uncle Bilbo) the truth can finally be revealed – Gimli was a most reluctant dwarf. JOHN RHYS DAVIES explains how he overcame doubts about the book and an allergy to make-up and learned to love The Lord Of The Rings, voted movie of the year in the Hot Press readers poll
Words: CRAIG FITZSIMONS
Considering this dino-franchise has grossed in the region of $1.5billion to date, a third instalment was as inevitable as the eventual extinction of life on Earth.
Brought to you by the makers of Human Traffic, SW9 often plays like its predecessor’s older, more world-weary sibling. Its thematic preoccupations may be similar, but it’s a less frenetic and free-wheeling affair.
DISCO PIGS stars, CILLIAN MURPHY and ELAINE CASSIDY, tell CRAIG FITZSIMONS about how they were drawn to the intense relationship and Cork patois of Pig and Runt
Running – appropriately enough – from the 26th to 29th of October in Dublin's IFC, the Horrorthon weekend is without doubt the ultimate word in non-stop guts and gore. The gruesome endurance test gets underway on the night of Friday 26th in IFC Screen One with a preview of John Carpenter's Ghosts Of Mars, a sci-fi/horror hybrid set 175 years into the future. Horrorthon highlights are as follows:
You have a film which finally can compete with the moment in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective where Jim Carrey attempts to talk through his arse in terms of sheer desperation to generate cheap audience laughs.
if you are the kind of individual who lives for musicals, Baz Luhrmann’s latest blast of kitsch madness is almost certainly the most mouth-watering feast served up for your consumption since Madonna’s Evita
The Parole Officer comes as a welcome antidote to the recent avalanche of sentimental Britflick crap, and certainly beats the likes of Bean hands down.
If I Should Fall From Grace is the most intimate portrait of SHANE MacGOWAN yet. CRAIG FITZSIMONS meets the director of the critically acclaimed biopic, SARAH SHARE.
Unleashing a savage avalanche of escalating violence that far outstrips any modern-day American precursor in terms of pure unblinking brutality, Takeshi ‘Beat’ Kitano’s first US-filmed, English-language outing is also one of the most hair-raising and hard-hitting mob thrillers you will ever have occasion to witness.
It’s an unappetising mix of Mills & Boon sentiment and yuppie vacuosity, with the unimaginative plot pitching obnoxious workaholic ad-exec Nelson Moss (Reeves) and bland nonentity Sara (Theron) together
The cinematography’s hugely impressive, and The Princess and the Warrior’s only real flaw is a pace which occasionally verges on the ponderous. Furmann and Potente carry the movie with two near-volcanic performances
Not Loach’s greatest film – arguably, not even one of his better ones – Bread And Roses still beats the living shit out of almost anything else to gain release this year
Nauseating and insidiously compelling in equal measure, writer/director Minahan’s debut opus Series 7: The Contenders is the filmic equivalent of channel-surfing all night long on American network telly.
RUGRATS IN PARIS –
THE MOVIE
Directed by Paul Demeyer and Stig Bergqvist. Featuring the voices of EG Daly, Cheryl Chase, Christine Cavanaugh, Kath Soucie, Casey Kesem, Debbie Reynolds, Susan Sarandon and John Lithgow
The second big-screen outing for the massively successful animated anklebiters, Rugrats in Paris is certainly as entertaining as the original movie.
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS
Directed by Courtney Solomon. Starring Justin Whalan, Marlon Wayans, Thora Birch
The inevitable cinematic spin-off of the phenomenally successful ‘role-playing’ fantasy/adventure game of the same name, the only real surprise about Dungeons & Dragons is how long it took to become a movie, the game having been around since the late Seventies.
For maybe the first hour or so, and in spite of its chillingly totalitarian flag-waving stance, Thirteen Days - Hollywood's first and probably last account of the Cuban Missile Crisis - almost bears the hallmarks of a good gripping political thriller.
Seven years ago, CATHERINE ZETA-JONES was so down on her luck that she was having to open supermarkets to pay the rent. Then came a move to Hollywood and the patronage of, first, Steven Spielberg and, then, Michael Douglas who was so taken with the Welsh actress' charms that he married her. In London last week for her new film, Traffic, she talked to CRAIG FITZSIMONS about life among the Hollywood A-list
A cinematic re-enactment of probably the most pivotal event in 20th-century world history - the Battle of Stalingrad - Enemy at the Gates has its occasional moments of considerable war-flick power, and might have even been worthy of respect had the casting not been so self-evidently insane.
About as substantial as the middle of a Polo mint, and with considerably less depth or wit, the horrific Sandra Bullock vehicle Miss Congeniality wastes no time in drilling a hole in your head.
Ever keen to forget their status as the uber-turncoats of Europe (went to war on Germany's side, 1915; changed sides, 1917; went to war on Germany's side, 1940; changed sides, 1943) it's a not-entirely-mysterious fact that Italian fascism is a subject very rarely tackled by Italian cinema, with the notable exception of Fellini's surreal Amacord (1973).
That's Brendan and Trudy, by the way, not RODDY DOYLE and KIERON J. WALSH, writer and director respectively of the new hit Irish film comedy. CRAIG FITZSIMONS meets them.
Inexplicably the recipient of five Oscar nominations, this stunningly bland and stultifyingly boring slice of French Heritage arthouse is destined to be adored by that breed of movie-goer (generally female, middle-aged, middle-class and middlebrow) who despises cinema but hasn't realised it yet.
Part anarchic love-story and part gentle satire on Celtic Tigerland, When Brendan Met Trudy is an off-the-wall, hit-and-miss but sprightly and ultimately winning affair.
Winner of last year's Special Jury Prize at Cannes, inspired by the obscure Peruvian surrealist poet Cesar Vallejo, soundtracked by Benny from ABBA (!) and directed by one-time enfant-terrible Andersson, Songs From The Second Floor is a real oddity.
This is easily the most eagerly-awaited film of all time - which is another way of saying we have been asked some 500 times when it would be coming out.
'The huge number of multinational executives being abducted abroad has made organised kidnapping a big business. It has also spawned a counter-industry - getting them back - and a secret drama involving spies and revolutionaries, AK-47's and armoured cars, helicopter drops and hideaways' - William Prouchtnau, Vanity Fair, May 1998.
PETER SHERIDAN has done a remarkable job in bringing Brendan Behan s Borstal Boy to the small screen. Here he talks to hotpress CRAIG FITZSIMONS and TARA BRADY about accents, alcohol and artists
Adapted from literary genius and uber-piss-head Brendan Behan’s auto-biographical account of an English borstal in the 1940s, Peter Sheridan’s Borstal Boy is never less than a magnificently faithful adaptation of its source, despite there not being a profanity in ear-shot.
Unquestionably one of the truly great works of American literature – I am being entirely serious here – Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch Who Stole Christmas still doesn’t seem in itself to contain enough plot development to justify big-screen treatment (plot: Grinch nicks all the presents, then realises there’s more to Christmas than presents, cue collective ‘ahhh!’)
The first – and, without the faintest doubt, the greatest – of Shakespeare’s 42 plays, Titus Andronicus proves beyond doubt that the late great Shake could out-shock any storyteller of the last five centuries, Messrs. Marlowe, Hitchcock and Cave included.
Phwoaarrr! Cor! Cop a load of the melons on that! This, at any rate, would seem to be the reaction Charlie’s Angels is intended to provoke among its target audience
While the notion of a thriller which runs chronologically backwards might sound like a confusing or downright self-defeating project from the offset (not to mention a mite pretentious - see the Martin Amis novel Time's Arrow), Memento makes for a strikingly effective and wholly original psychological jigsaw-puzzle.
Latest in the mindbogglingly endless line of feelgood northern-English 'heartwarmers', the curiously engaging Purely Belter derives fairly straightforwardly from a novel by Gateshead schoolteacher (and presumably Roddy Doyle-wannabe) Jonathan Tulloch.
Set during the late Cretaceous period, with a budget featuring almost as many noughts as the sixty-five million-year time lapse between then and now, this is among the five most expensive movies ever made.
Sparkling with a script that's nasty, witty and dark in equal measure, Wonder Boys is part college-comedy, part shaggy-dog tale and part Deconstructing Harry (without the flights of fancy and cheerfully constant use of the C-word).
It is difficult to imagine that anyone on the planet was salivating at the prospect of Liberty Heights - it is, after all, the director's fourth celluloid meditation on Jewish life in post-war Baltimore
Just as last year's American Pie was supposedly a Porkys for the 1990s, so the cheerfully braindead Road Trip is a post-P.C. revamp of trash-pile classic National Lampoon's Animal House (1978).
Elizabeth Hurley derided as a scab ; the film industry s stars getting militant; a total shutdown in production imminent. Strange times as Hollywood prepares for a major actors and screenwriters strike. By CRAIG FITZSIMONS and TARA BRADY
The mere concept of Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones and all the other aforementioned geriatrics striking out into space is so fantastically out-there it defies logic that someone actually deemed it worthy of a movie.
Cheesy and manipulative in the extreme, but unfailingly competent and well-executed, What Lies Beneath represents the ever-reliable, never-original Zemeckis' attempt to do Hitchcock, a task which he just about pulls off.
Lacking serious competition, Paul Verhoeven must stand alone as the most misogynistic director in existence, an auteur of sleaze without parallel in the known universe
So fantastically overwrought and resolutely 'arthouse' that it betimes seems to be a self-parody of Figgis' more obtuse work, Miss Julie is an adaptation of the August Strindberg play of the same name.
At the risk of sounding snotty, I can think of far more appealing ways to spend my time than sitting in darkened cinemas watching people being tied to chairs and brutalised with knives
It is normally my responsibility, as a film critic, to communicate to you some inkling of what the film under review is actually about. Unfortunately, in the case of Saltwater, this is utterly impossible
Inexplicably subjected to a recent barrage of lukewarm-to-hostile reviews, The Luzhin Defence is, in my much-sought-after opinion, the single sweetest love story of the last five years or so, and mandatory viewing for anyone with a brain and a heart.
For the more clear-sighted among us, Hollywood's blaxploitation output over the course of the Seventies (Foxy Brown, Coffy, Car Wash) may possess some faint traces of kitsch value, but can hardly be considered to constitute a golden cinematic era.
Based on the rags-to-riches tale of a hard-up Durham twelve-year-old from a striking-miner family, whose massive passion for ballet holds him out the promise of escape, Billy Elliot is so bland it leaves you on the point of tears:
Easily the most offensive filmic depiction of the female psyche since How To Marry A Millionaire, this obnoxious slice of frustrated spinster fiction must rank as a strong contender for the year's sickest movie.
Surpassing even the recent Gangster No.1 in its constant use of the now apparently-acceptable 'C'-word, Mr. Madonna's follow-up to the strikingly fresh '98 mini-classic Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels is more of the same only better.
Simultaneously an homage to Preston Sturges and a re-working of Homer's Odyssey filtered through the Coens' twisted sensibility, O Brother Where Art Thou? may not quite represent the brothers' finest hour, but still goes to prove that they're wholly incapable of producing anything that doesn't bear some trace of magnificence.
'Twas with a grim and heavy heart that I entered the cinema, having read Jon Bon Jovi's earnest effervescing about how U-571 manages to cut it as a Das Boot for the 21st century
Future generations, if there are any future generations, will look back on movies like Rules Of Engagement and feel a chill down their very spines: from Red Dawn through Independence Day and now this, the level of overt America-rules-the-planet fascism on cinematic display has positively gone through the roof.
IT HARDLY needs to be explained that Jackie Chan's latest offering is by some distance the worst film this fortnight in terms of dialogue and narrative sophistication – but as out-and-out mindless fun, it's up there with anything we've seen all summer.
Eccentric, sweet, thoroughly off-beat and endlessly entertaining, Woody Allen's latest work is a welcome relief in the worst cinematic summer on record.
More po-faced and humourless than anything Peter Greenaway has ever put his name to, Lars von Trier's hideous quasi-musical Dancer In The Dark represents the absolute ultimate in bullshit arthouse pretension
A home-grown, low-budget offering about a Dublin-based dope-dealer and his struggles against the forces of law and order, Flick is by no means as bad as the recent glut of gangster Britflicks - but for a movie with such a promising and praiseworthy agenda, it suffers from a curious lack of heart and charm.
Deafeningly loud, in-your-face, overheated, overlong, bereft of braincells and not half as much fun as the trailer might lead you to expect, Gone In Sixty Seconds is the latest plague to be visited upon the planet by Jerry Bruckheimer
The star of what s set to be the summer s hottest movie, High Fidelity, on love, obsession, movies, rock n roll, his pal Bruce Springsteen and the records he turns to when he s had his heart broken. With support from co-star Lisa Bonet and director Stephen Frears. Text: CRAIG FITZSIMONS
Easy on the eye, and not exactly challenging in the grey matter stakes, Pitch Black is a highly watchable if far from unforgettable slice of low-budget sci-fi/monster-movie daftness.
A relentless, blood-soaked grand-guignol bombardment of cheapo SFX-on-genocidal-rampage destruction, Final Destination boasts one of the worst scripts of all time, but it's an inordinate amount of fun, shining from start to finish with an idiotic magnificence reminiscent of Ed Wood (almost).
The 98,575,983rd Cockney-gangster thriller of the last year or two, Essex Boys could never be accused of excessive originality, but does at least treat its gratuitous-violence quotient with a deal more sensitivity than the last few flicks of this ilk.
It’s by no means the worst, most cynical or most offensive movie ever to bedevil our screens, but in terms of out-and-out dullness, My Life So Far has very few precursors in film history.
On pain of castration, I must point out that I'd happily watch Neve Campbell washing dishes, dusting shelves and hoovering floors for two hours, but it's disheartening to see how dire her taste in scripts has been since the original Scream, and this lame-brained romantic comedy hardly represents a huge improvement.
It sounds hard to believe, but somewhere out there, there is a comic who makes Eddie Murphy look like the most subtle and sophisticated humorist on the planet: his name is Martin Lawrence.
Yes folks, it's here at last: the most eagerly-awaited film in all human history, starring the almighty Rupert Everett alongside his erstwhile pal Madonna in what aspires to be a serious issue-based drama about parenting, surrogacy, homosexuality and the nature of friendship
"Go see chicken-movie! Go see chicken-movie!" chanted my three-year-old best mate in a paroxysm of enthusiasm and excitement on the way in - and I must confess even I was well looking forward to Chicken Run, the first full-feature flick from the men who brought you Wallace & Gromit.
The First (and almost certainly the worst) blockbuster to benight our summer thus far, Battlefield Earth is a work of such devastating intellectual incompetence and emotional emptiness as to make Star Wars: Phantom Menace resemble Bergman's Seventh Seal.
Minnie Driver
The comedy of the season has arrived! Fun fun fun! O joy, o bliss! Seriously, for all its putrid feelbland chirpiness, the unbelievably inoffensive Return To Me practically qualifies as a must-see, so inadvertently hilarious is the whole affair from start to finish.
With Jim Carrey having decided to go all serious, and Adam Sandler presumably next to follow, it has fallen to Saturday Night Live refugee Rob Schneider - writer and star of the infernal Deuce Bigalow - to assume the position of America's cinematic King of Smut.
Though hardly the modern-day Taxi Driver it aspires to be, Mary Harron's overdue adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 spinechiller is one of the most outrageously enjoyable serial-killer movies in recent memory.
A broadly Hitchcock-like frightener with allusions to ghosts and brutal slayings, Stir Of Echoes positively plays havoc with the heart-rate, and, if not exactly awash with originality, it's extremely satisfying in its own right.
THE ORIGINAL was, of course, an absolute joy and a thing of wonder, but its impact might have been even greater if they hadn't insisted on following it up with two sequels
IBEN HJELJE, the female lead in the new film of Nick Hornby s acclaimed High Fidelity, is the best thing to come out of Denmark since Hamlet.
Interview: CRAIG FITZSIMONS
NOW THIS is more like it: a flashy, testosterone-drenched, visually extravagant, Oliver Stone-directed two-and-a-half-hour movie about American Football, starring Al Pacino as the team's rugged, single-minded coach . . . let's say I was sold practically before the credits rolled, and was not disappointed in the slightest.
A THOROUGHLY B-movieish monster thriller which bears superficial resemblance to the likes of Godzilla and Deep Blue Sea, but possesses considerably more tongue-in-cheek humour than your standard no-brainer, Lake Placid is that strangest of creatures: a movie that only justifies its existence by virtue of its pure unredeemed awfulness.
A WORK of such complete and utter meaninglessness as to border on the profound, Million Dollar Hotel is by some measure Wim Wenders' most pretentious, most self-indulgent and least affecting work to date, although we'd probably accept it from just about anyone else.
Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, served fifteen years for a murder he had nothing to do with and was eventually released after becoming a Stateside cause celebre of Birmingham Six proportions.
A DELICIOUSLY subtle, slice of cinema at its most unhurried and carefully-crafted, Cider Rouse Rules represents a resounding return to form for Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom, best known for his supreme coming-of-age drama My Life As A Dog
THE WEIRDEST, most bizarrely-conceived movie in living memory – bar none – Being John Malkovich is practically impossible to get your head around on one viewing, and even harder to coherently explain.
A PISS-POOR slice of low-rent northern-English comic whimsy, with misguided feelgood pretensions and the most horrific costume design this side of Velvet Goldmine, this painfully lame romantic comedy should be available on video in all good bargain-bins for 50p before the year's out.
THIS ORIGINALLY started life as a mere play on the New York art circuit, but Hurly Burly's crackling dialogue and caustic observational sharpness meant it could hardly stay out of sight forever - genius always rises to the surface eventually.
FRANK DARABONT, whose 1994 Shawshank Redemption ranks as one of the most auspicious directorial debuts of all time, returns to centre stage after a lengthy six-year layoff with another Stephen King-penned Death Row drama,
A BRAVE and blisteringly powerful expose of the American tobacco industry's absolute moral bankruptcy, Michael Mann's stunningly accomplished fifth feature is perhaps the most truly important "issue" movie of the last few years,
DON'T LET the trailer put you off - David O.Russell's third feature is by some distance the most deceptively radical "war movie" to emerge from Hollywood in my living memory,
ADAPTED FROM Alex Garland's phenomenally successful novel of the same name, The Beach is by some distance Danny Boyle and company's most ambitious and expensive project yet, and the presence of Leo diCaprio in the central role will certainly boost its box-office prospects no end.
NEIL JORDAN's twelfth movie to date, and in many respects his bleakest, The End Of The Affair is British period drama at its most harsh and unforgiving.
FORTY YEARS ago, when Fantasia was first released, Walt Disney’s intention was that the spectacle would be continually updated with the endless addition of new segments.
THERE ARE a dozen or so films every year that somehow manage to signal their awfulness in advance merely by virtue of the title, and Double Jeopardy – misleadingly billed as a ‘suspense thriller’ – lives entirely down to expectation.
ALL HAIL the coolest character in the entire history of European cinema! The filmic equivalent of a methamphetamine and Red Bull cocktail, the dazzling Run Lola Run is a breathless, kinetically charged race against time which leaves the viewer dazed, stunned and enthralled, and is without doubt the most original and unforgettable foreign-language flick to invade our screens in many years.
THE STUDIO will probably make a mint on this one, depressing as it is to report - Ordinary Decent Criminal is, of course, a Hollywood-friendly account of the life and times of Martin 'The General' Cahill,
A SPRAWLING, uneven, lengthy and massively entertaining scuzz-cruise through Seventies New York, Summer Of Sam might well be Spike Lee's most broadly accessible film yet, and if it sinks without trace (as I suspect it might) it will be little short of a tragedy.
ILLITERATE PHILISTINE that I am, I never bothered carving out the time to read Angela's Ashes - I know I'm missing out on something absolutely amazing here, but I just didn't like the sound of it one bit.
ILLITERATE PHILISTINE that I am, I never bothered carving out the time to read Angela's Ashes - I know I'm missing out on something absolutely amazing here, but I just didn't like the sound of it one bit.
With his new movie End Of Days hitting cinemas nationwide, GABRIEL BYRNE
speaks frankly to CRAIG FITZSIMONS about the challenge of playing Satan,
US cultural imperialism and Ireland's growing economic divide.
Approximately one hundred times more intriguing and emotionally engaging than I'd dared to hope, this beautifully majestic period piece will set your heart singing no matter how hard you try to resist.
A weepy romantic melodrama for the wrinkled generation, Random Hearts is shamelessly sentimental stuff, but it's effective in its own manipulative way. I expected to hate it, but it was far too classy for that - and if the film isn't exactly in the Wings Of Desire league, it has a certain Club-Class style and sophistication which should sucker 90% of viewers in before they've even realised it.
The very recent success of The Truman Show has irreparably blighted ED-TV's chances of cleaning up at the box office, largely due to the fact that it's a variation on the very same film: a telly company films the life of an ordinary Joe Bloggs, the public go mad for it, the star himself slowly cracks up under the strain.
"Hollywood is all fucked up: you have to kiss people's asses and shit like that" explained the great Julie Delpy in a recent interview. Hollywood, of course, is invariably loath to depict itself in such an unflattering light - but LA Without A Map is a truly savage inditement of cine's heartlessness, and deserves to be seen for that reason alone.
Quite the most terrifying movie ever to feature a kid, this phenomenally spooky psycho-thriller is by some distance the darkest blockbuster offering of the year thus far, and had this most hardened of critics jumping out of his none-more-pale skin.
So stunningly awful and perversely enjoyable that it virtually qualifies as a must-see, Brokedown Palace is a hilariously incompetent women-in-prison drama which will do well to last more than a week at the 'plexes, so you might have to wait for the video.
CRAIG FITZSIMONS speaks to young Irish director DAMIEN O'DONNELL, whose debut feature East Is East takes a controversial look at Pakistani immigrant culture.
ESSENTIALLY A warm and feelgood north-English comedy of the Full Monty variety, East Is East may not exactly cut it as a masterpiece, but it’s as enjoyable and curiously sweet as any film I’ve seen in recent weeks, and it deserves more than a good run at the “plexes.
A MORNING of meditative Japanese arthouse cinema might not normally strike me as the most inviting way to spend a couple of hours, but whatever it was that took hold of me, I was seriously looking forward to this occasion.
A BLOOD-CURDLING howl of violent white rage that looks set to reverberate around the world for some time to come, Fight Club is an almighty, disturbing, monstrous motherfucker of a movie which power-drills its way into the viewer’s head like few films since the heyday of Martin Scorsese.
UNBELIEVABLY TOUTED in many quarters as a serious contender for Oscars glory, Ride With The Devil – an elegiac Dixie/Western set during the American Civil War – marks a sharp change of territory for its highly-respected director Ang Lee, a man more commonly associated with fine-lined character dramas such as the impeccable Ice Storm.
Will somebody please put this insufferable old bastard out of everybody else's misery? In the space of less than 18 months, Robin Williams has inflicted Flubber, Patch Adams and the malodorous What Dreams May Come upon audiences and critics alike, and I have slowly come to the conclusion that he must be hunted down and killed for the greater good of cinema's health.
Snazzily shot, deeply calculated, and enormously entertaining in its own overblown way, Pushing Tin is a sprawling mess of a movie which gets carried away yet still manages to entertain effortlessly.
In an ideal world, nobody would have been allowed to write anything about The Blair Witch Project before its release, and everybody could have experienced the shock at maximum impact. That might have carried its own dangers, however: people might literally have died from the terror.
PART THREE of the much-hailed 'Dogme 95' Danish arthouse project which has already brought us Festen and The Idiots, Mifune is by far the most involving of the trio, largely because it's filmed in straightforward, conventional fashion and doesn't seem too preciously proud of its own detached 'artiness' (The Idiots was terrible shite altogether).
A "YOOF" movie, as they call it over the water, GMT is essentially a retread of Human Traffic without any of the charm. I wanted to like it, and I tried fairly hard, but it just couldn't be done.
DISNEY's '90s output has been somewhat hit-and-miss, with only 1997's astonishingly dark Hercules coming close to must-see status, but this one is a cracker, and compulsory viewing for those privileged enough to be in touch with their offspring.
Essentially a '90s remake of Porky's Revenge and its sequels, American Pie (provisionally entitled Virgin Territory) is as smutty, juvenile and lowbrow as anything you'll ever see. Its saving grace is that it is, for the most part, hilarious and curiously charming.
THAT BREED of cinemagoer known as the war-movie freak will, in all probability, find The Trench a mammoth disappointment. Not enough explosions; not colourful enough; no rousing martial music – no fun at all, really.
CINEMA ATTRACTS more over-the-top descriptions than most artistic media: we apply the words ‘hard-hitting’ and ‘harrowing’ to practically any film that shows us things we don’t want to see, no matter how trivial the context.
JON TURTELTAUB might not be the worst film-maker in existence (step forward, Michael Winner) or the most boring (my vote: Renny Harlin) but in terms of pure undiluted sentimentality at its worst, no-one lays it on quite like Turteltaub.
Stanley Kubrick’s 13th and last film in a glittering career is finally upon us, having been the subject of excessively feverish anticipation for well over a year now.
Robert Altman’s ’90s output has been somewhat hit-and-miss (for every Short Cuts, there’s been a Prêt-à-Porter) but following the somnolent three-hour torpor of last year’s Kansas City, he has rebounded with a genuine winner.
It is never a particularly auspicious sign when a film hangs around in post-production for over a year, and in The Thirteenth Warrior’s case, the process has been so protracted that director John McTiernan’s subsequent feature (the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair) has already beaten it to the big screen.
Competent, professional and workmanlike – but inescapably dull, and never especially engaging – Con Air director Simon West’s first “serious”, flick isn’t a bad movie by any means, but it isn’t exactly thrilling stuff either, and while it swallows up a couple of hours effectively enough, it leaves little to remain in the memory.
The most breathlessly exhilarating cinematic joyride of its kind since Pulp Fiction, Doug Liman's follow-up to the much-loved Swingers is an instant cult classic which could be hailed in many quarters as a generation-defining masterpiece.
Possibly Hugh Grant's greatest atrocity yet in a career liberally littered with them, this obnoxiously crass and racist pseudo-comedy is about as amusing and enjoyable as being hit repeatedly over the head with a sledgehammer while an endless remix of Queen's 'We Will Rock You' plays incessantly in the background.
The most unremittingly bleak and depressing indie offering to emerge from the States all year (with the possible exception of Paul Schrader's Affliction), this deeply fucked-up slice of white-trash junkie psychosis is a hard-hitting, supremely affecting journey into the black heart of the American nightmare, with some of its images powerful enough to merit comparison with Badlands, Taxi Driver and other similarly-flavoured excursions to hell.
Following on from the colossal success of Independence Day and Men In Black, Will Smith has fallen flat on his face with his latest summer blockbuster.
This remake of the 1968 Steve McQueen thriller is ten times more involving than I'd dared to bargain for, given the presence of Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo.
There is more than enough class on that cast list to delude you into thinking that Playing By Heart would be a decent flick at the very least, but for whatever reason, writer/director Willard Carroll's ambitious debut suffers from a total absence of magic.
'Bring on the models, baby, let the magic begin!' intones the immortal Austin as his triumphant, shagadelic sequel begins to rev up - and who are we to argue?
Easy on the eye, but downright insulting to the brain, this competently glossy but hopelessly predictable sub-Bond thriller will probably be best remembered (if at all) for the hilarious will-they-won't-they pairing of Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones (age difference: thirty-nine years).
Shakespeare fans, please draw a deep breath and count to ten: Ten Things I Hate About You, the latest dumb-ass Yank teen comedy, purports to be a modern-day remake of The Taming Of The Shrew.
Michelle Pfeiffer was, for a while, one of the most intelligent and watchable actresses in circulation - but her taste in scripts has gone completely down the tubes over the course of the last decade, and this shockingly dreary melodrama hardly heralds a return to form.
Film event of the year? This depends on you. The long-awaited fourth instalment of the Star Wars series has attracted such ridiculous reams of relentless hype that it can't help but obscure the project itself - we are, after all, talking about a simple two-hour adventure/fantasy film for kids from six to sixty, not the Second Coming of Christ.
A MODERNISED, dumbed-down Dangerous Liaisons remake for the Clueless generation, Cruel Intentions may not have half of its predecessor’s style or verbal wit, but it’s still a rattling good yarn, and the prospect of erstwhile vampire-slayer Sarah Michelle Gellar in all-out ultraslut mode should be enough to sway any floating male voters.
THE PSYCHOPATHIC serial-killing doll from the Child’s Play series, his face liberally decorated with huge black stitches, Chucky is one of the most gruesomely horrendous sights ever exposed to mankind.
YOU MAY have already forgotten the name of Nick Leeson, whose fifteen minutes of fame should by rights have ended with his six-year incarceration in a Singapore prison.
If ever a film was destined to polarise opinion, this is the one. An insider document of the weekender/raver lifestyle, with vague similiarities to Trainspotting and a thumping techno soundtrack, Human Traffic is extremely unlikely to translate effectively to those outside the chemical-generation culture.
Hey hey hey, here comes joy and merriment! Time for dancing in the streets! Hugh Grant stars in a rewrite of Four Weddings And A Funeral!!! Julia Roberts too! Yippeeee!!!.
Whether or not the world needs a new wave of tributes to John Hughes' teen-Bratpack films of the '80s must be a matter of opinion, but it seems we might have to brace ourselves anyway.
Fun, fun, fun! A film about 300 years in the life of a violin? It would be hard to think of a less prepossessing subject for a film - The Drying of the Paint or The Growing of the Grass might at least find a certain cult niche, but this is really putting the audience to the test.
Movies based in American high schools are seldom noted for their originality, but the lack of imagination on display in She's All That still boggles the mind - next to this, the likes of Breakfast Club could qualify as masterpiece cinema.
Filmed in permanently wintry Minnesota, drenched in spilled blood and bleak snow, A Simple Plan invites comparisons to the Coens' Fargo. It is, however, much warmer in tone and more immediately affecting, a result of palpably human performances from the four individuals at the centre of the tale.
An absolute feast for the eyes, The Matrix is a hugely expensive and inordinately flashy virtual-reality filmic experience that has to be seen to believed.
The Full Monty's inexplicably gigantic success was a nice enough story when it happened, but it got way out of hand, and we might have to live with the consequences for some time to come.
If narrative sophistication and decent dialogue were prerequisites for a good movie, Twin Dragons wouldn't have a hope in hell of passing the test - its simplistic action scenarios are so straightforward they could have been lifted from a Captain Marvel comic, and the dialogue is diligently studious in its avoidance of anything even faintly intellectually taxing (sample line: "Run! Get him").
Occasionally somewhat drab, and erring on the side of over-earnestness, A Love Divided is nevertheless one of the more heartfelt and instructive films to emerge from this isle in recent years.
Lots of critics seem to quite like Best Laid Plans for reasons I am at a complete loss to fathom. Nowhere near as dark or brooding as its storyline would seem to demand, nor as funny as it could have been with a modicum of effort, Best Laid Plans drowns in its own delusions of coolness. Only Reese Witherspoon's characteristically edgy performance offers anything to savour.
Judged purely on its artistic and dramatic merits, Parting Shots is a work of scarcely-believable awfulness - without doubt one of the truly worst films of the decade, if not all eternity.
A lazy, manipulative, smug and thoroughly calculated rom-com/road-movie with no heart to speak of and both eyes firmly fixed on the box-office, Forces of Nature is another market-driven exercise in summertime schmaltz.
Possibly weirder than anything Cronenberg has done before (and we're talking about the man responsible for Crash and Naked Lunch here), Existenz is the most genuinely warped film I've seen in several years, and like most of the man's work, it leaves you quite unsure what to make of it.
How can I give you some inkling of the interminable tortures that lie in wait for you should you be so foolhardy as to attend Message In A Bottle, Kevin Costner's latest box-office smash?
Every bit as haunting and entrancing as the Big O's ballad of the same name, but nowhere near as enjoyable, the truly terrifying In Dreams seems to finally mark the end of Neil Jordan's flirtations with anything resembling commercial mainstream cinema.
Gothic, brooding, malicious and deeply disturbing, the film is a dark-beyond-description thriller-chiller which heralds an apparent return to the more fevered style of Angel and Company of Wolves.
I've seen a few weird movies down the years, but Happiness - Todd Solondz' controversial but massively acclaimed follow-up to the brutally impressive Welcome To The Dollhouse - is truly in a league all of its own.
Grim, sick, morbid, perverted - and perversely excellent - the misleadingly titled Happiness is a raging, vengeful, malevolent celluloid beast that hacks away mercilessly at every taboo in the book, and makes the Farrelly Brothers' output look tamer than the dullest Merchant Ivory.
While the title would seem to hint at another turgid, ultra-dull, join-the-dots courtroom thriller of the John Grisham variety, A Civil Action actually has much to recommend it.
The 14th Dublin Film Festival will be underway by the time you read this, and will remain in full swing till 25th April. Admission to all screenings is restricted to Festival members, but since the membership fee is a mere £3, it's certainly more than worth your while taking the trouble. Here's a brief rundown of ten of the expected highlights.
If the mere mention of the word 'art' generally has you reaching for either the remote or the revolver, I'm with you all the way - and as movie premises go, it might seem that the tale of a bohemian New York photographer's struggle to retain her 'artistic integrity' is one best left to the poseurs.
THOUGH directed by Robert Rodriguez - the maverick Texan semi-genius responsible for El Mariachi and Desperado - The Faculty is, in essence, a Scream 3 in all but name, with a bonus blitz of sci-fi special effects.
ONE GETS used to watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing, unspeakably dull movies in this line of work, and the longer you've been at it, the less easily pissed-off you become - but every once in a while, something comes along that practically makes you pine for a re-run of Police Academy 4.
WITH DIALOGUE such as *you'd have married me by now if it wasn't for the pigs* to cement the case for the prosecution, there is no way the makers of Waking Ned can escape the charge of begorrah Rent-a-Paddy Oirishness.
However, you're a fool if you let prickly political correctness interfere with your appreciation of artistic works (Father Ted has done more to perpetuate the image of Irish people as witless simpletons than any amount of Mick McCarthy's muddled musings) - and judged purely on its own merits, Waking Ned is a harmless (at worst) and hilarious (at best) little caper that only a complete curmudgeon could find offensive.
SAVAGE, disturbing and fiercely moral, the searingly powerful American History X - something of an American cousin to Romper Stomper - follows hot on the heels of Arlington Road and anticipates the similarly-themed Apt Pupil.
CRAIG FITZSIMONS talks to KURT JONES and DAVID KELLY, writer/director and star respectively, of Waking Ned, a gentle comedy set in Ireland, but shot in the Isle of Man. Pics Cathal dawson.
*THE TWO biggest pleasures in life are fucking and killing.* This, stated succinctly and brilliantly, is the world-view of the redoubtable Perdita Durango, quite definitely the most unforgettable noir heroine since (at the very least) Thelma ... Louise.
I could have got my priorities in order, given Patch Adams a miss and devoted my morning to that long-postponed appointment with the dentist. I fucking should have, too.
IF THE truth be told I'm not normally much of a lad for war movies. I'm generalising here, but they're too long, their scripts tend to stink, there aren't many women to be seen, and I never did dig the sight of human blood in huge quantities.
If you're actively looking for reasons to dislike this movie, there's no shortage of them, but if you're prepared to roll with it and take it on its own terms, you'll be rewarded richly in terms of entertainment.
THE BEST pure thriller I've seen in several years, Arlington Road practically gave me a heart attack, and I'm convinced it will hospitalise a few people before its run is up.
LORD ALMIGHTY, exactly how boring was Payback? It's difficult to quantify. I could probably write a book about how boring it was, but it wouldn't be very interesting and it probably wouldn't sell too many copies.
THE STANDOUT foreign-language flick of the season, sure to scoop awards by the bucketload, Central Station effortlessly avoids any of the snags that almost always seem to attend acclaimed prizewinning foreign movies. Beautifully filmed, it manages to adopt and sustain an epic, melancholic, sweeping majesty from start to finish.
UNIMAGINATIVELY BILLED as a hybrid of Forrest Gump and The Truman Show, this expensively-budgeted time-travelogue boasts an intriguing enough premise (two Nineties kids let loose in a Fifties TV show) as well as its fair share of highly inventive visuals, but owing to an excess of sub-Capra sentimentality and a grossly over-extended running time, it ends up spoiling much of its own impressive initial impact.
JOHN LASSETER'S follow-up to the by-now classic Toy Story doesn't come close to reaching the sublime heights scaled by its predecessor, but that would probably be too much to ask.
AN EARLY frontrunner for the best Britflick of '99, this poignant and hilarious little Northern low-budgeter is one of the most savagely funny and warmly human yarns to emerge from across the water in many moons.
'I feel my quill is broken! The organ of my imagination has withered! The very towers of my genius have crumbled!' Aye, pal, I know that feeling well: it seizes me every fortnight as I sit down to crank out my copy. The difference is that people actually read Shakespeare, even many centuries after his departure.
A BIOPIC of the renowned cellist Jacqueline du Pre, based on her sister's book A Genius in the Family, this worthy but less-than-pleasant psychodrama charts the parallel lives of supertalented, tortured Jackie (Emily Watson) and her quietly-spoken sister Hilary (Rachel Griffiths).
Craig Fitzsimons, a fan, springs to the defence of Red Bull, the soft drink sensation that
seems to have become a victim of establishment reefer madness .
THE WEALTH of acting talent on board in This Is My Father should tip you off that they're not there just to pocket the cheques, and despite its faintly 'Oirish' premise, the movie - brainchild of the three Quinn brothers - is ludicrously enjoyable from start to finish, acted with huge passion by practically all concerned, and genuinely affecting above and beyond what anyone might have dared to hope.
NO SURPRISES here, as if you were expecting any - it's just another reliable instalment in the apparently endless series, essentially an extended two-hour episode minus the ad breaks, with typically assured performances from Picard and crew whiling the time away agreeably.
THE OBVIOUSLY dark and troubled mind of screenwriter supreme Paul Schrader has been responsible for some of the century's most compelling cinema (he penned the scripts to Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, the latter being almost better in screenplay form than it was as a movie.) Now an increasingly confident director, Schrader has gifted us the first must-see arthouse flick of the season.
IF YOU can physically bring yourself (kicking and screaming, no doubt) into the cinema - something of an uphill task, given the presence of Julie Walters - here you will be handsomely rewarded with a compact and highly entertaining little drama, which actually manages to address the Northern situation while remaining funny throughout - no mean feat that.
FRANCIE BARRETT rose to public acclaim in 1996 when he became the first member of the travelling community to represent Ireland at an Olympic Games. Now a documentary, Southpaw, has been released which relates the Galway boxer s story. CRAIG FITZSIMONS met him and was impressed.
This Is My Father is a new Irish film which manages to be commercial but not patronisingly Irish. CRAIG FITZSIMONS spoke to one of the stars, PAT SHORTT.
WIM WENDERS’ soundtracks to date have offered irrefutable proof of his seemingly flawless taste in music, but until Buena Vista Social Club, he had yet to make a music film.
Anybody who has lived their life up to this point without managing to see Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal 1960 horror-flick Psycho is hereby urged to drag their lazy ass down to the IFC
Having just bagged the coveted Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival, John Boorman's eagerly awaited biopic of Dublin's most notorious fun lovin' criminal, Martin Cahill, has been hailed as a silver screen masterpiece. Craig Fitzsimons hears about the physical, moral and financial perils of making The General.
Popular culture has seldom been this unremittingly grim. Resurrection Man is based on the blood-curdling activities of
the Shankill Butcher, and it stars
stuart townsend.
Interview: craig Fitzsimons.
LUKE GRIFFIN has been getting rave reviews for his starring performance in The Disappearance Of Finbar. Could we be witnessing the arrival of
a cinematic superstar?
Interview: Craig Fitzsimons.
No-one could contemplate using a headline like that in Hot Press unless of course it was to sum up an article about Howard Stern, the New York DJ who credits himself with having invented the concept of penis jokes on radio. Tape: craig fitzsimons.
As suede prepare for their headline slot at Dublin Castle next month, their stock has never been higher, thanks mainly to the success of their fantastic third album Coming Up. craig fitzsimons talks to singer brett anderson about it and invites him to take stock of the last few wildly successful months.
Shakespear s Sister siobhAN FAHEY makes her acting debut in a powerful new short movie that goes to the heart of the Dublin heroin epidemic. Here, she tells craig fitzsimons about the legitimate highs of working in both music and film.
When it was first published, very few people would have predicted the extraordinary, best-selling success of Fever Pitch. Now, NICK HORNBY s winning story of a chronic football obsessive has been elevated to the big screen. But, in a world of bungs, bootboys, bandwagon-jumpers and the relentless hype of Sky Sports, is he still in love with the (sometimes not so) beautiful game? Interview: CRAIG FITZSIMONS.
When it was first published, very few people would have predicted the extraordinary, best-selling success of Fever Pitch. Now, NICK HORNBY s winning story of a chronic football obsessive has been elevated to the big screen. But, in a world of bungs, bootboys, bandwagon-jumpers and the relentless hype of Sky Sports, is he still in love with the (sometimes not so) beautiful game? Interview: CRAIG FITZSIMONS.
Twenty years after its original release, George Lucas sci-fi epic STAR WARS is back on the cinema screens of the world, fully restored and with several minutes of extra new footage. CRAIG FITZSIMONS explores the myth, mayhem and madness of the film, and attempts to nail down exactly what makes it so great.
I could never figure out why so many scribes creamed themselves over the Pixies. To me they were mediocrity incarnate, musically limited and hardly bursting at the seams with lyrical wisdom.
Craig Fitzsimons meets Jimmie Dale Gilmore, possessor of a unique high ’n’ lonesome voice and yet another great product of the Lone Star State who, belatedly, is
experiencing a modicum of stardom himself.
They may have been dismissed as your typical goofy American oddballs, but as Craig Fitzsimons discovers when he meets THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS co-conspirator JOHN LINNELL, there’s definitely some sort of method to their madness.
