Cinema Roundup August 8th

_BAB1857Three great movies of the past are returning to Dublin cinemas this week.

Robert Wise’s classic musical West Side Story plays as part of the Lighthouse cinema’s ongoing summer musical season on Wednesday. It’s one of the greatest musicals ever made, and seeing the Jets and the Sharks duke it out on the big screen is highly recommended. Leave the flick-knife at home though.

As part of the Irish Film Institute’s month-long retrospective of “Cursed” films (movies that were under-appreciated at the time of their release), John Frankenheimer’s 1966 sci-fi drama Seconds screens, also on Wednesday. Shot in moody black and white, it’s a dark Orwellian tale of a middle-aged nobody who changes his identity through an advanced form of surgery.

To Catch a Thief returns all week at the IFI. It’s a lesser Hitchcock, but even Hitch’s lesser works are better than most. Rare for a Hitchcock movie, here it’s the actors who take centre stage ahead of their director, with fantastic chemistry between leads Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.

The best of this week’s new releases is Argentinian thriller Wakolda, a fictionalised account of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele’s time on the run in South America. It’s an old-fashioned thriller of the type Hollywood seems no longer interested in making.

God’s Pocket is one of Philips Seymour Hoffman’s final performances, but sadly it’s a mess of a film, a crime drama that plays more like a comedy at times thanks to an uneven tone.

By Eric Hillis

Image: Movie of the Week: West Side Story