Category Archives: Movies

Exotic Dancers, Cardinals and Kieran Culkin

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3 movies I watched in 2024!

Anora:

The story of a exotic dancer/sex worker and the son of a Russian oligarch. Warning: there is a lot of nudity and sex in this movie. Is the sex gratuitous? Well one of the main characters is a sometime sex worker and if a movie about a carpenter had a lot of carpentry in it would the carpentry be considered “gratuitous”? Just saying. But all that aside,,once the rich Russian kid’s minders and family get involved in trying to end the relationship between their son and the dancer, the movie becomes hilarious, madcap and frenetic! A lot of fun!


Conclave:

Fat Cat cardinals get together to elect a pope, and needless to say, there’s a lot of jiggery popery. It’s got Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow and their performances make up for some ridiculous B movie plot twists at the end. Isabella Rosselini plays the long suffering head nun who doesn’t say much but her face is permanently fixed in a look of barely concealed contempt for all around her. Her nuns are basically maid servants to the feuding cardinals. Ralph Fiennes is brilliant.


A Real Pain: Kieran Culkin playing a version of his Succession character (without the financial support) and Jesse Eisenberg playing, as usual, the socially awkward tech nerd. They are cousins on a trip to Poland to visit their dead grandmother’s home. It’s very funny and cringeworthy and moving all at the same time and not afraid of anticlimax. It proves the old adage that you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives…one of the best !

The Banshees of Inisherin (Colin Farrell and a Donkey)

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This is one tedious, depressing mess of a movie with a gruesome, ludicrous, arbitrary with a capital A plot twist worthy of the third season of some schlocky Netflix series when the writers have run out of ideas.

It opens with Colin Farrell walking along a windswept cliff in the west of Ireland, in the early 1920’s. He’s dressed like he’s doing a fashion spread for GQ ( “Paddy Chic”). He has a twenty first century haircut, dyed jet black, combed forward, no parting at the side! And his eyebrows are trimmed! He plays one of the main characters, a dimwitted Irish farmer who’s in love with his donkey (the movie was written and directed by an Englishman, Martin McDonagh….I’m just sayin’). Naturally, he’s on his way to the pub even though it’s only 2 in the afternoon. He goes to the pub a lot. The pub is of course populated by the usual stock characters, Sean O’ Garrulity and Sean Mac Stereotype and yes, at one point, Una Ni Mournful sings a maudlin ballad.

As for that plot twist, it involves self mutilation. Why? Shock value? Yes. Lazy writing? Yes. McDonagh does nothing to make us believe that the character is capable of the act.

Colin Farrell and Kerry Condon, and in particular, Barry Keoghan do their best with  it and there are some laughs, but rural Irish dysfunction and loneliness  have been done a hundred times over and a lot better than this.

Score: Two potatoes out of Five. 🥔🥔