Pictureland

Darkness, darkness.  Poor Father James (Brendan Gleeson) may be a priest in Count Sligo, but his parish seems more a hell on earth than the picturesque Atlantic Coast of Ireland. This apparently good priest is made to answer not only for the trangressions of his church, but all of the pent-up outrage of his country in the early 21st century. "You have to put up with shit like this on a regular basis?" asks his visiting daughter, Fiona (Kelly Reilly).  "There's a lot of it going around, let's put it that way," responds the weary man. Calvary is, among several other things, the result of writer and director John Michael McDonagh avoiding the sophomore slump much more nimbly than his brother Martin.  The younger McDonagh followed his highly original first feature In Bruges (2008) with the deeply mediocre Seven Psychopaths (2012).  Perhaps the moral of that brief story is to make sure that you have Brendan Gleeson at the head of your cast. Gleeson pl...

Sometimes, one can't help but imagine the pitch meetings.  In the case of The Sapphires , it could well have gone something like...think of Whale Rider meets The Commitments!   Or perhaps it was more a matter of Rabbit Proof Fence meeting Dream Girls .  And then they placed a conference call to The Commitments .  Though I suppose it would be Skype at this point. What we have more specifically with The Sapphires is a film about a group of aboriginal young women whose musical aspirations converge with a shambolic soul-music-loving Irishman.  These charmingly disparate souls soon find themselves touring the war zone that was Vietnam in 1968.  All of this based on a play of the same name.  And based loosely, as is said (and quite appropriately, in this case), on real events and characters. The 1968 timing is significant not only for all the upheaval that was occurring in the world, but for what was beginning to happen in Australia.  The...