Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker is about a man who leads others, however obliquely, and despite obstacles, both external and internal, to faith. Faith is faith. Without it, man is deprived of any spiritual roots. He is like a blind man. Just more than thirty years ago, on 26 April 1986, a nuclear disaster occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear [...]
Did the speech made by Pope John Paul II at Drogheda during his visit to Ireland in 1979 change the course of Irish history? This is the contention of a new documentary John Paul II in Ireland: A Plea for Peace, written and directed by David Naglieri. The originality of the film’s premise lies [...]
In December 1971, Dirty Harry appeared on movie screens. Starring the then rising movie star, Clint Eastwood, the film proved as controversial as it was successful at the box office. […]
Just as the Second World War ended, the 1946 novel Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham became a bestseller. Perhaps more than any other, the noir genre fitted the mood of Post–war America. It was a nation that had not yet emerged blinking into the Technicolor 1950s of Eisenhower and later prosperity. It was [...]
The 39 Steps is one of five films that Alfred Hitchcock made in England about espionage in the mid-to-late 1930s. These films capture the growing threat felt in Britain from foreign powers. In their scenarios the nation's security was nowhere more threatened than by spies hiding in plain sight... The Thirty-Nine Steps. A novel. Then a film: The 39 Steps. In the end, that [...]
In Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson continues to present an alternative world-view to filmgoers. It is one at odds with almost all that emanates from Hollywood, but, nevertheless, is one that finds a welcome reception in the real world, where family and marriage, patriotism and courage, faith and self-sacrifice still form part of the daily lives [...]
In Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos, it is as if there is an existential darkness present throughout. In this world, no matter how cunning the schemes or how fail-safe the get-away plans are, for all concerned there is a retribution coming. In Melville’s cinematic universe the wages of sin are always death… Recently, at London’s British Film [...]
The human and animal worlds are distinct, and relations between them are as much affected by Original Sin as all else in the universe. No amount of wishful thinking, no matter how well-intentioned or deluded, is going to change this… In the last decades there has been a romanticization of nature and man’s place [...]
Ireland has chosen between life and death. Death it shall have. The fallacy that a liberal abortion regime solves anything will soon become apparent to Irish citizens… Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned… [...]
So brazenly was Britain’s Culture of Death on display recently that the scales dropped from the eyes of any who wished to see. Many do not want to see, though, and look away as life support machines are turned off, and the full force of the law is used to prevent the sick moving to a [...]
Sean O’Casey’s play The Silver Tassie will grow in significance in the years ahead because it is a mirror that is now being held up to modern Ireland—a country which, like the crippled hero of the piece, can no longer cope with platitudes and half-truths, but which has also lost faith in its former [...]
The body language of the band is one of a frozen watchfulness. Each band member has the look and stance of one who has witnessed something truly awful, and yet is powerless to do anything about it. Before their eyes, what the Rolling Stones were witnessing was the ending of a life… It was [...]
Michael Herr left us one of the best accounts of men at war in his book, Dispatches. A reporter, he had gone to Vietnam to find a story, but had found something else that would hound him for the rest of his life… Dispatches by Michael Herr (Knopf Doubleday, 272 pages, 1977) As the 1967 Summer [...]
French director Abel Gance’s magnificent 1927 silent film Napoleon was only rediscovered thanks to the efforts of an English schoolboy, who was given a film projector as a Christmas present… There are films about legendary figures that become legends themselves. Such a film is Abel Gance’s Napoleon. Premiered in 1927, it was so far ahead of its [...]