Bullitt (1968)

The General, written and directed by John Boorman, stars Brendan Gleeson as Martin Cahill, a real-life if legendary Irish outlaw who was assassinated by the IRA in 1994. The film, shot in black and white, begins with the assassination, ordered because Cahill had sold some stolen paintings to the Protestant paramilitaries of the UVF. “They…

A feminine, if not feminist, look at the world, but one that is beautiful to look at and that packs an emotional punch

Dominique Deruddere’s Everybody’s Famous! (Iedereen Beroemd! in his native Flemish) is a rather charming little movie, though without enough of a sense of detachment from the dream of pop music fame which it otherwise makes fun of. Some will say it is condescending, but I don’t think it condescending enough, at least in this sense….

A movie that is a very good example of its kind, even though its kind is not to this critic’s taste

The General, written and directed by John Boorman, stars Brendan Gleeson as Martin Cahill, a real-life if legendary Irish outlaw who was assassinated by the IRA in 1994. The film, shot in black and white, begins with the assassination, ordered because Cahill had sold some stolen paintings to the Protestant paramilitaries of the UVF. “They…

A feminine, if not feminist, look at the world, but one that is beautiful to look at and that packs an emotional punch

Dominique Deruddere’s Everybody’s Famous! (Iedereen Beroemd! in his native Flemish) is a rather charming little movie, though without enough of a sense of detachment from the dream of pop music fame which it otherwise makes fun of. Some will say it is condescending, but I don’t think it condescending enough, at least in this sense….

A movie that is a very good example of its kind, even though its kind is not to this critic’s taste

Hard Rain by Mikael Salomon could have been and almost is a really competently managed thriller. Half-way through it I was weighing up whether it deserved one or two stars and delighting in what I took to be an unexpected throwback to the old days in Hollywood when the stories the movies told were tough…