You’ll be dazzled by the beauty of this five-star gem
Oh my goodness, The Quiet Girl is a truly beautiful and deeply moving work of cinematic wonder. If you are the sort of film-goer who only ventures into arthouse territory a couple of times a year, this Irish gem – exquisitely directed by Colm Bairéad – has got to be one of them.
Based on a novella by Claire Keegan and partly played out in subtitled Irish Gaelic, it’s the story of Cait (Catherine Clinch) a young girl growing up on an impoverished farm in rural Ireland in the early 1980s.
Barely ten, Cait already feels
like an outsider – bullied and struggling at school, hardly speaking at home and wetting the bed at night.
But her life is transformed when she is suddenly sent away to live with an older couple on another farm and, for the first time in her short, unhappy life, experiences real kindness.
But how long will it last? We don’t know and nor does shy, hesitant Cait.
Clinch is wonderful but so too is Carrie Crowley, who plays Eibhlin, the woman who quickly becomes more of a mother to Cait than her own ever was. This is a film about innocence and loneliness, secrets and sadness and has a power and resonance that definitely linger.
First there was Spider-Man, then there was Dr Strange and now – just one week later – there is Evelyn Wang, a middle-aged Chinese-American launderette owner who in Everything Everywhere All At Once suddenly discovers – on a trip to her local tax office, as it happens – that she can slip from one multiverse to another and experience some of the alternate lives she might have lived. Or is actually living, according to multiverse theory.
Directed by the film-making duo, Daniels and starring Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis and the guy who was once Short Round in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, this chaotic, zany and, at times, contrivedfeeling picture is being enthusiastically hyped by cinema’s cool kids but left me underwhelmed, despite its deliberately crowdpleasing ‘feel-good’ story.
Never mind, no doubt I thoroughly enjoyed it in another universe.
Gaspar Noé is one of the enfants terrible of French cinema, notorious for films featuring excessive sex or violence and sometimes both.
But even enfants terrible grow older and in Vortex he focuses on the terrible trials of old age as we watch a once intellectual and creative couple – she a psychiatrist, he a film buff – battling dementia and ill-health.
It’s painfully slow at times, slightly over-wrought and not
exactly cheering but some of Noe’s creative touches are lovely and Francoise Lebrun is fabulous as Elle.
Father Stu is not only the title of Mark Wahlberg’s new film it’s also a spoiler in that this is the apparently true story of Stuart Long (Wahlberg) who was originally a boxer, then became an unsuccessful actor and finally set out to become, er... a Catholic priest.
Inevitably, religion features prominently in a film that never quite grips, despite the best endeavours of Wahlberg and Mel Gibson in a rare supporting role. But then it is directed by his partner, Rosalind Ross.