Abode ★★★☆☆
Directed by Liam O Mochain. Starring Liam O Mochain, Mary Murray, Stephen Jones, Rose Henderson, Donncha Crowley. 15A cert, limited release, 81 min
“I wanted to make a film about home and what it means to different people,” O Mochain has said, and his feature cannot be faulted for variety or sincerity. This economical anthology film moves from a story about homeless people making the best of Christmas to the tale of an older woman belatedly making first acquaintance with her grown son, a yarn that seems to have escaped from Black Mirror. The best episodes have an unpretentious warmth that jollies you happily to welcome destinations. If you don’t care for one, another will be along in a moment. Full review DC
Anemone ★★☆☆☆
Directed by Ronan Day-Lewis. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley. 15A cert, gen release, 126 min
Daniel Day-Lewis, returning to acting for the first time in eight years, plays a hermitic former squaddie in a sluggish, but still overheated, first feature from his son Ronan. Bean is strong as the protagonist’s brother. No sensitive person watching Anemone could fail to be intrigued about where Ronan Day-Lewis will go next. This grandiose, inventively operatic project is no ordinary film. But it is not quite a good film either. Too monotonous. Too self-regarding. Showy to the point of meretriciousness. It hardly needs to be said that Day-Lewis snr makes the best of his regretful, disturbed character. Full review DC
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Die My Love ★★★☆☆
Directed by Lynne Ramsay. Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, LaKeith Stanfield. 15A cert, gen release, 118 min
Eight years after the brutal precision of You Were Never Really Here, Ramsay returns with a feverish, self-consciously bold psychodrama that teeters between brilliance and incoherence. Adapted with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch from Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel, Die My Love transplants a tale of female collapse from rural France to an eerie decaying farmhouse in Montana, where isolation and new motherhood push Grace (Lawrence) to the brink. Her initially tender husband, Jackson (Pattinson), can only watch as marriage curdles menacingly. Uncompromising, hypnotic and often indelible looking – even when the theatricality and fractured structure erode any emotional weight. Full review TB
Train Dreams ★★★★☆
Directed by Clint Bentley. Starring Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Clifton Collins jnr, Kerry Condon, William H Macy. 12A cert, limited release, 102 min
Adapted from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Train Dreams is Clint Bentley’s elegiac portrait of a man (and his country) undergoing a quietly radical transformation. The director of Sing Sing turns his attention to the woodsy romance of the United States in the early 20th century, through the person of Robert Grainier (Edgerton), a nomadic logger and railroad worker whose unremarkable existence mirrors the US’s stealthy march towards modernity. Bentley sometimes leans too heavily on lyricism and voiceover, but the film’s earnestness and restraint cast a strange spell. Its muted reverence salutes those nation builders who were never visible to begin with. Full review TB
