Movie of the week – Sullivan’s Travels
Preston Sturges’ 1941 comic masterpiece Sullivan’s Travels plays Monday evening at the Irish Film Institute. Joel McCrea is the pretentious filmmaker who disguises himself as a hobo to add authenticity to his next movie, a patronising look at poverty. Along the way he hooks up with Veronica Lake and learns a lesson about the value of entertainment in the lives of the poor. Now that we’re in awards season, with all the sanctimonious guff about ‘important cinema’ it brings, this is a well timed screening.
In the Heat of the Night
The movie that confirmed Sidney Poitier as a star, 1967’s In the Heat of the Night, gets a rerelease at the IFI. Poitier is a powerful presence as the Northern cop who teams up with Rod Steiger’s racist Southern Sheriff to catch a killer. Almost 50 years later, it’s still just as poignant.
Paterson
This week’s crop of new releases contains one of the year’s best in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, a lovely tribute to an everyday man (Adam Driver’s unassuming bus driver) in an ordinary town (the titular New Jersey locale). I usually find Jarmusch’s work lacking in heart, but this is as warm a movie as you could hope to find. Two hours of sheer feelgood bliss.
Allied
A WWII thriller from director Robert Zemeckis and starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard sounds like an automatic winner, but Allied is a bit too accurate in its depiction of the wartime experience. By that I mean it consists of long stretches of boredom punctuated by the odd explosion of action. A great opening Morocco set half hour gives way to a less interesting plot concerning Pitt’s investigation into the possibility his wife, Cotillard, may be a Nazi spy.
A United Kingdom
A United Kingdom tells the true story of Ruth Williams, a white Londoner who caused a stir when she married Seretse Khama, the heir to the throne of Botswana. Too concerned with the details of its historical plot to pay sufficient attention to its characters, it’s a movie destined to be viewed on old boxy TVs wheeled into classrooms by hungover history teachers.
By Eric Hillis of themoviewaffler.com
