Tara Brady

Tara Brady

Contributor

Tara Brady, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a writer and film critic.

Oliver Laxe on the making of desert rave epic Sirat: ‘You jump into the abyss’

‘Film-maker of the senses’ on his apocalyptic, Oscar-nominated sensation and being a ‘freak’ in Spain

Four new films to see this week: The Secret Agent, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, The Testament of Ann Lee and The Moment

Charli XCX, Rose Byrne, Amanda Seyfried and Wagner Moura feature in a quartet of movies released in the week of February 20th, 2026

Oscar nominee Rose Byrne: ‘When I go through passport control in Ireland they say welcome home’

The star on the ‘incendiary’ If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, her Australian identity and women in comedy

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: Maternal stress becomes searing, breathless psychodrama

Rose Byrne, Jessie Buckley’s biggest Oscar rival, is extraordinary in Mary Bronstein’s film

The Secret Agent: Danger hums in nervy Brazilian thriller

Labyrinthine film set during military dictatorship evokes 1970s conspiracy chillers

Four new films to see this week: ‘Wuthering Heights’, Crime 101, The Day the Earth Blew Up and Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo feature in a quartet of movies released in the week of February 13th, 2026

Little Amélie or the Character of Rain review: Playful, gorgeous and emotionally impactful

This animation, set in 1960s Japan, reimagines an early colonial childhood as a period of intense metaphysical speculation

Life under Saddam Hussein: ‘A child being asked to bake a cake without flour or sugar was not absurd’

Hasan Hadi’s film The President’s Cake centres on a deceptively simple premise: every year, schoolchildren were selected to make offerings for Saddam’s birthday, an impossible burden

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie revels in its cartoonish artifice

Directed by Peter Browngardt, the film is steeped in the grammar of the Looney Tunes’ golden age

Four new films to see this week: A Quiet Love, Send Help, My Father’s Shadow and Twinless

Rachel McAdams, Sope Dirisu, Dylan O’Brien, James Sweeney and Aisling Franciosi feature in a quartet of movies released in the week of February 6th, 2026

Twinless review: Grief is seldom this entertaining

James Sweeney turns what initially feels like a jolly, quirky bromance into something far darker, more complex and hilarious

My Father’s Shadow review: An intimate family portrait and a deceptively sprawling portrait of Lagos

Akinola Davies jnr’s film quietly marries personal and national histories in Nigeria

Morfydd Clark: ‘Hamlet is about the suffering of many to make a few people very wealthy. That felt painfully relevant’

The Welsh actor on playing Ophelia in a new modern-day take, how bilingualism has shaped her, and the evergreen relevance of Shakespeare

Four new films to see this week: Is This Thing On?, Nouvelle Vague, Primate and Rabbit Trap

Will Arnett, Laura Dern, Zoey Deutch, Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen feature in a quartet of movies released in the week of January 30th, 2026

Aisling Franciosi: ‘I’m doing exactly what I dreamed of doing when I was a kid’

The Dublin-born actor adds warmth and understated comedic flair to her role in James Sweeney’s Twinless

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