Movie of the Week – The King of Comedy
Robert De Niro has been making bad movies now for a lot longer than he was making good ones, but three of those good ones are being shown at the Lighthouse this week. Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy features arguably the actor’s finest performance as the unforgettable Rupert Pupkin, a deluded stand-up comic who kidnaps Jerry Lewis’s talk show host in order to get his 15 minutes of fame. It plays tonight. On Sunday you can catch De Niro in The Mission, while on Wednesday Once Upon a Time in America screens.
Mirror
The Irish Film Institute continue their Tarkovsky season with a newly restored re-release of Mirror playing all week. You can also catch Stalker on Saturday and Nostalgia on Wednesday. Three big screen must sees there!
Bigger Than Life
On Sunday afternoon at the IFI Nicholas Ray’s classic 1956 melodrama Bigger Than Life plays. James Mason is outstanding as a teacher driven to madness by prescription drugs.
Journey to the Shore
It’s just as well there are so many classics on offer in Dublin cinemas this week, as the new releases aren’t up to snuff, save for Japanese drama Journey to the Shore. Spiritual without being preachy, it’s a charming and touching story of a young widow offered a second chance to spend time with the ghost of her late husband.
X-Men: Apocalypse
It feels like we’re getting a superhero movie every week now and this week’s is X-Men: Apocalypse. After an interesting start, this one descends into the usual clichés and ends up as little more than an overblown wrestling match. Make it stop!
A Hologram for the King
Shame on Tom Hanks for starring in A Hologram for the King, a ‘drama’ that’s really little more than a promo encouraging American businesses to relocate to Saudi Arabia. Hanks plays an American businessman who finds the Middle Eastern country is just what he needs following a mid-life crisis. Awful stuff.
The Silent Storm
On the other end of the spectrum we have The Silent Storm, an overblown tale of a tyrannical presbyterian minister and his long suffering wife on a remote Scottish island. The usually reliable Damian Lewis and Andrea Riseborough are uncharacteristically terrible in this headache inducing shoutfest.
By Eric Hillis of themoviewaffler.com
