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Irish Times

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
1/5
Melania (2026) Donald Clarke No good impression emerges of the former Slovenian model. No bad impression emerges either. Ratner’s film achieves, rather, a sort of passive distance – as you might get by pointing a camera, for close to two hours, at a waterfall or a wheat field.
Posted Jan 31, 2026  Edit critic review
3/5
Rabbit Trap (2025) Tara Brady Technically, Rabbit Trap is assured, particularly in its use of analogue equipment and dense sound design. Emotionally, though, it remains curiously hollow.
Posted Jan 29, 2026  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Primate (2025) Tara Brady [Certain moments in the film] coalesce into amusing, tense and joyfully disposable entertainment carefully calibrated for audience shrieks and merriment.
Posted Jan 28, 2026  Edit critic review
3/5
Rental Family (2025) Donald Clarke It could be enormously clunky, but the quiet warmth of Fraser’s performance, the delicacy of Hikari’s direction and the ravishing location work just about distract from the teeth-smarting sentimentality.
Posted Jan 26, 2026  Edit critic review
2/5
Mercy (2026) Donald Clarke There are no insights on screen that you won’t expect from speed-watching the trailer (or speed-reading this review). If this worst-case scenario does yet happen, it will surely not turn out quite so boringly.
Posted Jan 26, 2026  Edit critic review
3/5
The History of Sound (2025) Donald Clarke There is ... the sense throughout of a film rustling through its own innards in search of an emotional ember that refuses to catch fire. Nice to look at. Nice to listen too. Easily forgotten.
Posted Jan 26, 2026  Edit critic review
3/5
H Is for Hawk (2025) Tara Brady The goshawk reminds us how enthusiastically humans project themselves on to the animal kingdom. The film reminds us how limiting these analogies can be.
Posted Jan 23, 2026  Edit critic review
3/5
No Other Choice (2025) Tara Brady ...the mise-en-scene is meticulous, the violence intermittently darkly comic, but the effect is tonally various and curiously blunted.
Posted Jan 22, 2026  Edit critic review
4/5
Megadeth: Behind the Mask (2026) Tara Brady As ever, Mustaine is unmistakably himself. The tunes are good, too. Godspeed, Megadeth.
Posted Jan 16, 2026  Edit critic review
4/5
The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025) Tara Brady [Kaouther Ben Hania] carefully sidesteps ethical questions about the use of performance alongside archival evidence with a clear-headed chronicle of a tragedy and of wider Palestinian suffering.
Posted Jan 15, 2026  Edit critic review
3/5
Song Sung Blue (2025) Donald Clarke This lachrymose yarn ... believes very much in its own irresistibility. That such a claim proves borderline justified is mostly down to bravura performances from two old troopers and charming ones from two committed youngsters.
Posted Jan 13, 2026  Edit critic review
3/5
Giant (2025) Donald Clarke The core (largely true) story is just about strong enough to keep the film on its feet through all 12 rounds. A narrow victory on points.
Posted Jan 13, 2026  Edit critic review
3/5
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) Donald Clarke Part one sweated to establish a Britain mired in fantastic decay that echoed developments in the real world. The new film, evocatively shot by Sean Bobbitt, feels like a trivial, if entertaining, diversion on the way to a more substantial closing fall.
Posted Jan 13, 2026  Edit critic review
2/5
People We Meet on Vacation (2026) Tara Brady The seasoned comic actors Alan Ruck, Jameela Jamil and Molly Shannon are criminally underused. Colin Wilkes’s sleek costumes can’t compensate for the lack of onscreen chemistry. They might as well be wearing hazmat suits.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
3/5
Oh Canada (2024) Tara Brady It lacks the wild provocations of Schrader’s scalding recent trilogy, but Oh, Canada pokes and probes in quieter, sneakier ways.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
4/5
Peter Hujar's Day (2025) Tara Brady Whishaw’s performance is a theatrical masterclass in controlled ramble; Hall’s is the art of listening, with responses that range from concern to a slightly cocked head.
Posted Jan 02, 2026  Edit critic review
4.5/5
Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros (2023) Tara Brady Wiseman has made films about bureaucracies, city halls and cabarets, but here the institution is pleasure itself. It’s a feast that will leave many viewers ravenous.
Posted Jan 02, 2026  Edit critic review
5/5
Marty Supreme (2025) Donald Clarke For all the trademark Safdie unease, Marty Supreme remains an enormously good time at the cinema. The 150 minutes speed by as we encounter an array of brilliantly cast cameos.
Posted Dec 31, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
David Bowie: The Final Act (2025) Tara Brady Embraced as a musical primer, Bowie: The Final Act offers an amiable if scattershot overview that hopscotches between early Glastonbury, Ziggy Stardust and Blackstar.
Posted Dec 30, 2025  Edit critic review
5/5
Cover-Up (2025) Tara Brady At a moment when truth is increasingly relative, Cover-Up acknowledges the grim continuation of the state apparatus that Hersh first exposed in the aftermath of My Lai. Without journalists of his calibre, we’d be none the wiser.
Posted Dec 27, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Palestine 36 (2025) Donald Clarke Making skilful use of colourised archive footage, the film drags up not just unavoidable pointers to the area’s current miseries, but also reminders of similar western interventions in parts as remote as Vietnam and (yes) Ireland.
Posted Dec 20, 2025  Edit critic review
5/5
Born That Way (2025) Donald Clarke The edit moves seamlessly from biography to a discussion of rights often denied children with exceptional needs. "Their issues are not health issues," Lydon says. "They are who they are."
Posted Dec 20, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/4
Testimony (2025) Donald Clarke The film, edited with characteristic fluency by Emer Reynolds, makes no pretence that all issues have been tidied away. But it does at least allow that the survivors are achieving the status of national heroes. Few will complain at that.
Posted Dec 20, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Christy (2025) Donald Clarke The inevitable redemption is handled with great vim and a shameless determination to cause audiences to punch air and dab eyes. Only those with the coldest of hearts will be able to resist.
Posted Dec 20, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Pillion (2025) Donald Clarke At the heart of Pillion, a very English class of reasonableness brushes against an equally English interest in hierarchical kink. Nothing wrong with that sort of thing, but doesn’t it play terrible havoc with the knees.
Posted Dec 20, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Eternity (2025) Donald Clarke One ends up longing for a sniff of reality. But the three leads demonstrate absolute belief in romantic absolutes as we drift towards a class of sob-heavy denouement Hollywood now rarely attempts.
Posted Dec 20, 2025  Edit critic review
5/5
It Was Just an Accident (2025) Donald Clarke As ever, Panahi works with amateur actors to secure a connection with everyday realities. The huge moral dilemmas spin out from the personal concerns of fleshy, believable human beings.
Posted Dec 20, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) Donald Clarke A huge-budget variation on Sunday-evening mystery telly. As such, it will entertain Netflix viewers over Christmas. Though one or two might wonder if the streamer could have got three or four Poirots and a Marple for the same money.
Posted Dec 20, 2025  Edit critic review
5/5
Hamnet (2025) Donald Clarke There is much else to admire in this beautifully shot, cruelly raw film, but, with some justification, most of the talk will be about the female lead. One can think of few other actors who can so unashamedly access such torrents of simulated emotion.
Posted Dec 19, 2025  Edit critic review
2.5/5
Goodbye June (2025) Donald Clarke There are, thanks not least to the presence of Timothy Spall, a few flavours of Mike Leigh early on, but Joe Anders’s screenplay soon sinks into a fuzzy mess of warm hugs and cheap epiphanies.
Posted Dec 19, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Breakdown: 1975 (2025) Donald Clarke Sharp analysis of a body politic apparently unaware of its own psychological instability. Dickens was really on to something with that "best of times ... worst of times" stuff. The age of wisdom. The age of foolishness.
Posted Dec 19, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
The Six Billion Dollar Man (2025) Tara Brady ...The Six Billion Dollar Man may be the most chilling film of 2025, not simply because of the notoriety of Julian Assange, its subject, but also as a clinical exposé of the elaborate machinery of state power, media hostility and private opportunism.
Posted Dec 18, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants (2025) Tara Brady The visual gags are fresh, the jokes are funny, the world-building is disarmingly buoyant, and the musical cues, from Holiday in Cambodia to Carmina Burana, are playful.
Posted Dec 17, 2025  Edit critic review
The Salt Path Scandal (2025) Ed Power This is a gripping film that doubles as a homage to the dying art of old-school gumshoe journalism, where a story is meticulously pieced together over weeks and months.
Posted Dec 17, 2025  Edit critic review
2/5
Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) Donald Clarke Not surprisingly for a film that stretches to three hours and 17 minutes, the pacing, despite the surfeit of action, has all the breakneck oomph you’d expect from an Antiques Roadshow marathon.
Posted Dec 16, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Eleanor the Great (2025) Tara Brady Squibb injects enough energy, empathy and comic timing to make Eleanor watchable even when her choices strain credibility.
Posted Dec 11, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Ella McCay (2025) Tara Brady At 85, Brooks retains an instinct for human foibles and complex characters, even if on this occasion the material doesn’t always live up to his cast.
Posted Dec 10, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) Tara Brady ...older viewers will be glad to note that this beautifully scrubbed new [3D] edition has aged rather well. That is thanks largely to the film's reliance on Stan Winston and robotics, rather than CG.
Posted Dec 08, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Horseshoe (2025) Tara Brady The combustible set-up is familiar: a traumatised family, a contested inheritance and a house rattling with difficult history. But Horseshoe reinvents this dog-eared premise with dark humour...
Posted Dec 04, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Folktales (2025) Tara Brady Sequences of dog-sledding across blue-tinged frozen fields; building campfires under the aurora borealis, snowfields framed by dark and ancient trees; and tending to the school’s boisterous animals offer both visual adventure and lots of feels.
Posted Dec 03, 2025  Edit critic review
5/5
The Ice Tower (2025) Tara Brady This is a seductive hinterland of dark and projected desires, and mostly, of viewing from the darkness.
Posted Dec 01, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Blue Moon (2025) Tara Brady Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon features a luminous ensemble and arguably a career-high performance from Ethan Hawke, yet it’s hobbled by an aesthetic gamble so distracting, so patently absurd, that it nearly sinks the enterprise.
Posted Dec 01, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
The Thing with Feathers (2025) Tara Brady It’s tricky material, but what the script loses by making an actual monster it gains in small, poignant details.
Posted Nov 20, 2025  Edit critic review
2/5
Jay Kelly (2025) Tara Brady Baumbach’s characteristically barbed wit too often makes way for self-indulgence and sentimentality. Ruminations on fame as a hollow, unfulfilling enterprise have all the depth of a disposable contact lens.
Posted Nov 19, 2025  Edit critic review
2/5
Wicked: For Good (2025) Donald Clarke If you bought the first film’s brash visual aesthetic – the result of a giant toddler vomiting candyfloss all over Walt Disney World – then you will be relieved to discover it has got no less stomach-unsettling.
Posted Nov 18, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Jujutsu Kaisen: Execution (2025) Tara Brady For long-time fans it’s a kinetic, fantastically violent self-referential spectacle. ...For the uninitiated, the whiplash pacing may be exhilarating.
Posted Nov 14, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Alpha (2025) Donald Clarke That overbearing mass of existential angst almost certainly contributes to the many negative responses, but few will endure its attack without admitting they’ve sat through something out of the ordinary.
Posted Nov 14, 2025  Edit critic review
3.5/5
Nuremberg (2025) Tara Brady When the polished dialogue and meticulous staging make way for real archive footage from the camps, it’s as wrenching as it ought to be.
Posted Nov 11, 2025  Edit critic review
4/5
Train Dreams (2025) Tara Brady Train Dreams may mourn a disappearing US, but, more movingly, its muted reverence salutes those nation builders who were never visible to begin with.
Posted Nov 07, 2025  Edit critic review
3/5
Die My Love (2025) Tara Brady Die My Love is uncompromising, hypnotic, brave and often indelible looking, even when the theatricality and fractured structure erode any emotional weight.
Posted Nov 05, 2025  Edit critic review
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