The Last Rifleman (2023)

Who in their right mind would go back to that place? Northern Ireland, 2019. World War Two veteran Artie Crawford (Pierce Brosnan) is newly widowed and living in Lough Valley care home. On the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy against all advice to the contrary from his fellow inmate Tom Malcolmson (Ian McElhinney) he decides to secretly escape to France to pay tribute to the war dead. He embarks on an arduous but inspirational journey through Ireland and across to France to pay his final respects to his best friend Charlie Lennon (Joseph Loane) who never returned. They formed The Three Musketeers from East Belfast with Maggie (Ethlinn Rose), whom Artie married. He stows away in the back of a laundry van and makes his way to Dublin where he and fellow passenger Rory (Samuel Bottomley) listen to Ennio Morricone music and then hitch a lift in a lorry to the ferry port at Rosslare where he conceals himself in a caravan belonging to Juliette Bellamy (Clemence Poesy) and her family. Due to illness he is discovered by the crew: What am I going to get? Life? drawls the proud 92-and-three- quarter-year-old after they find his passport is 17 years out of date. When he reaches France he makes his way to where his best friend fell, befriending a former enemy, Friedrich Mueller (Juergen Prochnow) singing It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, and shares a drink with fellow American vet Lincoln Jefferson Adams (John Amos). All the time he is unaware that he is being followed by Irish Journal reporter Tony McCann (Desmond Eastwood) ever since he absconded while the story is being broadcast nightly on the news and daughter Gloria (Ali White) and her family are cheering him back home on while the nursing home staff are aghast at the publicity … It’s a shock to learn you’ve lost the war. It’s a greater shock to discover you’ve been on the wrong side. It is a truism that a good film story will attract Jungian-style a number of writers and producers at the same time: something to do with the global consciousness. Or coincidence. Or just bad timing. So it is that the march was somewhat stolen on this by the near-simultaneous release of Michael Caine’s last film, The Great Escaper, also adapted from the real life story of Bernard Jordan, the English WW2 vet who slipped out of his home in 2014 to the commemorations in Normandy. The twist here is that the protagonist is Northern Irish (so the journey is longer, for starters) and played by an actor required to convincingly age up by twenty-plus years, with Brosnan playing the flashbacks from 1994 as himself, as it were, and Maggie Cronin as his beloved wife, already suffering memory loss as a harbinger of a life lived out in supervised care. The screenplay by Kevin Fitzpatrick understands the basic rule of the road movie – it’s an emotional journey! – and plays that aspect to the hilt. The vehicles, in order: laundry van, train, taxi, bus, lorry, caravan, ferry and finally, an army helicopter. Artie has a way with words (and a Norn Irish accent to boot) and the complexities of the trip, introducing a variety of characters to the ensemble to teach Artie how to survive (those diabetic attacks punctuate the story), how to get through pesky port controls and what to do when you meet a German veteran paying his own respects, lift the seriocomic drama above the mere recounting of a travelogue. His determination and righteousness give his character a nice flintiness. Effectively a story of survivor’s guilt, this is told and played with great charm with smart use of music to illustrate the dramatic highlights. Shot around Belfast in August 2022 with thirty credited producers in a cross-border co-production between Screen Ireland, RTE and Northern Ireland Screen, it’s a wonder this was made at all! Directed by Terry Loane. You know Artie – a man of mystery

Ordinary Love (2019)

How do you say to someone, Don’t die? Joan (Lesley Manville) and Tom (Liam Neeson) Thompson are a happy, long-married couple who enjoy a quiet life until she discovers a mass in her breast and makes an appointment to see a doctor who confirms she has a lump. When it is removed along with many lymph nodes she then proceeds to have chemotherapy. Her recovery is difficult and painful and she befriends the terminally ill teacher Peter (David Wilmot) of her late daughter. Her hair falls out, her temper frays and she and Tom have a major argument when she is at a low point and taunt each other.  They have a nice night together and make love before her double mastectomy. After Peter’s death they prepare for Christmas and decide to invite Peter’s boyfriend to join them … Putting sick people together:  how is that going to make anybody feel better? Even a marriage of kindness and vulnerability can hit a rocky patch. Facing up to a cancer diagnosis can bring out the worst in anyone, even briefly. Asking tough questions of a doctor when it’s not your illness makes you the rude guy; likening your bystander role to that of the person being mutilated and burned in operating theatres and treatment rooms makes you intolerable. For a while. This is also a story about bereavement and a Sixties Modernist house empty of personal touches because a child died, we’re not sure when. Even the goldfish dies. Death is contagious, it seems. And in the midst of that atmosphere somehow a marriage of true friends carries on, through hospital appointments, surgeries, horrific medical solutions and the deaths of other people in the ward. Manville and Neeson are tremendous in a subtle piece of writing by Owen McCafferty. Directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn and filmed in Northern Ireland, with a score co-written by producer David Holmes.  A triumph of intimacy, in the best sense. You’d rather be worse than better

’71 (2014)

Why aren’t you out there looking for him? Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell) a new recruit to the British Army is sent to Belfast in 1971 at the beginning of The Troubles. Under the leadership of the inexperienced Second Lieutenant Armitage (Sam Reid) his platoon is deployed to a volatile area where Catholics and Protestants, Nationalists and Loyalists live side by side. The unit provides support for the local police force (the Royal Ulster Constabulary) as it inspects homes for firearms, shocking Hook with their rough treatment of civilians. A crowd gathers to protest and provoke the British troops who, though heavily armed, can only respond by trying to hold the crowd back. Abandoned inadvertently by his military unit, Gary has to survive the riot alone and make his way back to the barracks through unknown territory, taken to a pub that’s a front for Loyalists until a bomb being built in a back room by the Army’s counter-insurgency unit explodes. Local IRA factions don’t know it’s a mistake and blame each other while a Catholic father Eamon (Richard Dormer) and his daughter Brigid (Charlie Murphy) rescue Gary when they find him injured by shrapnel, contacting the Official IRA’s officer Boyle (David Wilmot) for assistance and he is offered up to the Military Reaction Force led by Captain Sandy Browning (Sean Harris) in exchange for murdering IRA leader James Quinn (Killian Scott) … Posh cunts telling thick cunts to kill poor cunts.  That’s the army for you.  It’s all a lie. A film whose notion of patriot games is ratcheted up a poetic notch by taking its inspiration from the classic Belfast film  Odd Man Out minus its sense of tragic romance (nor is this a symbolic rendering of that troubled locale:  it’s definitely Belfast).  This time the drama of entrapment centres on a wide-eyed British squaddie who is alternately running around the city and hiding wherever he can in a race against time and a contemplation of innocence versus harsh experience. Breathlessly shot and paced, this is the best Northern Irish film since the Carol Reed masterpiece, its genius perhaps deriving in part from the cold eye of strangers in a strange land – Scottish playwright Gregory Burke and French-Algerian director Yann Demange – but also because it cleaves to the rules of the best thrillers as well as loosely recalling the 1970 Falls Curfew, making a complex situation comprehensible by a never-ending series of kinetic events. This is about someone running for his life and he is brilliantly played by O’Connell who quickly learns that there are black ops and bad guys on both sides in this dirty war. Harris is terrifying as the brutally treacherous player Browning. This is no country for young men but there’s an awesome array of them here – Sam Reid, Barry Keoghan, Paul Anderson, Jack Lowden, Martin McCann, among others. It’s a rites of passage movie dialled up to 11 and then some;  politics are almost an afterthought until you remember they’re everything and nobody and nothing is as they appear. Brilliantly controlled and utterly gripping. For God’s sake will you never leaves us alone?

Kissing Candice (2017)

I don’t know if I’m dreaming or I’m awake. Lonely and bored small-town teen Candice (Ann Skelly) dreams of a more exciting life and is rescued from an epileptic episode by a stranger Jacob (Ryan Lincoln). Becoming obsessed with this young man who has materialised from her vivid dreams and into her real life, she finds herself being drawn in and entangled with a dangerous local gang he’s in which is led by Dermot (Conall Keating) whom her policeman father Donal (John Lynch) suspects when local boy Caleb (Jason Cullen) disappears… It was a lot safer here during the Troubles. Written by first-time director Northern Irish Aoife McArdle (who has a background in music videos and commercials) this Irish film has plenty of imagination and a hallucinatory style but is an untethered narrative with no real logic. The dreamy ambience is strained by the social realist setting on a grim border county housing estate where Candice’s fantasies provide an escape valve from the bleakness while her friendship with Martha (Caitriona Ennis) allows for some barbed humour. The writing unravels, careening between the real world gang plot and the abstract coming of age/mental health line, but it has a kind of sleepwalking atmosphere. Now the mad ones have the run of the place

Odd Man Out (1947)

If you get back to your friends, you’ll tell ’em I helped you. Me, Gin Jimmy. But if the police get you, you won’t mention my name, huh?  Johnny McQueen (James Mason) has been in hiding in Kathleen Sullivan’s (Kathleen Ryan) home for the past six months since his escape from prison. He’s the leader of a political group (the Organisation, code for the IRA) that needs funds although his compatriots think he’s not up to the task:  he believes negotiating with the other side might get them further than attacking them.  Nonetheless he takes part in a raid on a bank but it goes wrong and he’s shot as he kills a cashier. Pat (Cyril Cusack) drives off before Johnny can get into the getaway car and the gang are the subject of a manhunt while Johnny is left to struggle on his own relying on help from passing strangers …  R.C. Sheriff adapted F.L. Green’s novel and while it’s not named, this is clearly set in Belfast. Mason is rivetting as the terrorist who’s experiencing his delirious last long night of the soul in a film that is equal parts documentary and pretentious psychological thriller, with wonderfully atmospheric canted angles and shadows from Robert Krasker’s cinematography. The supporting players are largely drawn from the ranks of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre – including Robert Beatty, W.G. Fay, Joseph Tomelty, Noel Purcell, Eddie Byrne and Dan O’Herlihy. Albert Sharpe (presumably fresh off Finian’s Rainbow on Broadway, where he made his fortune) plays a bus conductor. Robert Newton impresses as the wild philosophising artist painting Johnny. While some exteriors were shot in Belfast it would appear a great many scenes were done in London including a reproduction of the famous Crown Bar, which was actually a set at D&P Studios. A powerful and gripping drama, this remains one of the great British films, an unconventional, potent and poetic treatise on compromise, brutality, daring and death centering on a passive protagonist around whom much of the plot revolves. Out of the ordinary. Directed by Carol Reed. MM #1800.

Oh, Mr Porter! (1937)

Everything on this station is either too old or doesn’t work. And you’re both! Mr Porter (Will Hay) is sent to be the stationmaster of an underused and putatively haunted ramshackle Northern Irish railway station in rural Buggleskelly. His unprofessional colleagues are the elderly deputy master Harbottle (Moore Marriott) and the insolent young Albert (Graham Moffatt) who operate a black market in train tickets for food and tell Porter his predecessors were offed by One-Eyed Joe. He plans to upgrade facilities by organising a trip to Connemara – unaware that some of his customers are gunrunners intending to transport weapons into the Irish Free State …  Filled with confusion, misunderstandings, a run-in with terrorists and a disappearing train, this is a terrifically realised comedy with Hay and his co-stars performing perfectly in roles that would later inspire Dad’s Army. Written by J.O.C. Orton, Marriott Edgar and Val Guest and based on a story by Frank Launder, this was directed by Marcel Varnel and remains Hay’s most acclaimed work.  It’s a minor British genre classic filled with gags galore – there’s even a donnybrook in a pub!

The Survivalist (2015)

Paintball was never like this. Or maybe if Samuel Beckett set Godot in Norn Iron after the oil supplies dried up …it would be. Ah, that’s it. Martin McCann is burying someone. He’s a paranoid hermit whose veggie forager lifestyle in this post-apocalyptic world is upset by the arrival of a feral old woman (Olwen Fouere) and her daughter (Mia Goth) and after the girl exchanges sexual favours they agree a grudging truce and hang around longer than one night. The women are planning on killing him but an assailant captures the girl and shoots him. He knifes the stranger and the women remove the bullet and cauterise the wound which needs maggots to heal. Then with an attack by 6 men on the garden they revert to Plan A while the girl tries to perform an abortion on herself … This triangular relationship based on uneasy silences, danger and treachery has a constant shifting centre and revolves around two shells and a bullet. There is minimal dialogue but the performances and Damien Elliott’s photography contribute texture to an atmospheric drama that is probably science fiction, but with added cannibalism. Yum. Written and directed by Stephen Fingleton, who  originally made this as a short called Magpie with more or less the same cast.