Hilary & Jackie (15) Selected cinemas
Cinema's insistence that musical geniuses lead tortured, tormented lives - Shine, Amadeus, The Music Lovers et al - continues with Hilary & Jackie, which takes as its subject the flamboyant English cellist, Jacqueline du Pre, who died of multiple sclerosis in 1987 at the age of 42.
Marking the cinema debut of the British television director Anant Tucker, the film opens on a compelling extended prologue detailing the close childhood friendship between Jackie and her older sister, Hilary, both gifted young musicians. The girls are engagingly played by Auriol Evans and Kelly Flanders, before Emily Watson and Rachel Griffiths take over the roles as the grown-up Jackie and Hilary. The film goes on to document Jackie's rise while Hilary withdraws from music into marriage to a young conductor, Kiffer Finzi (David Morrissey), and on to Jackie's own marriage to the Argentinian pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim (James Frain), and her history of manic depression. The movie echoes the marital relationship in John Boorman's The General when Hilary unexpectedly grants Jackie's repeated requests to have sex with her husband, Kiffer.
That revelation was first made in the controversial book, A Genius In The Family, written by Hilary du Pre and her brother, Piers, and it serves as the basis of the uneven, oddly structured screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce. It inevitably views the relationship between the two sisters, and their sometimes bitter sibling rivalry, from Hilary's point of view - until it abruptly switches to re-viewing events through Jackie's eyes.
This element of the film is not just needlessly repetitive, but also illogical because neither Hilary nor Jackie could have witnessed all the events each is supposedly observing - and everything is already distilled through Hilary's point of view in the book on which the film is based.
These errors of judgment are all the more unfortunate in the case of such an interesting story, which catches fire in the accomplished, expressive portrayals of Jackie and Hilary by Emily Watson and Rachel Griffths. There is a further asset in the music, which includes some of Jacqueline du Pre's own celebrated recording of Elgar's Cello Concerto - and a duet which begins with Beethoven and segueways into the Kinks' You Really Got Me.
Don't Go Breaking My Heart (12) General release
Named after the hit single by Elton John and Kiki Dee, Don't Go Breaking My Heart is a modest, old-fashioned English romantic comedy revolving around the Hampstead dinner party set and directed by Willi Patterson, whose background is in commercials. In the movie's most appealing performance, Jenny Seagrove plays the recently-widowed Suzanne, who is attempting to come to terms with her husband's death and its impact on her two children. Getting involved in a new relationship is far from her mind, even though the audience will be several steps ahead of her when she bumps into an American sports therapist (Anthony Edwards from er), whose girlfriend has left him. There are further complications, not least of them Suzanne's lecherous dentist (a pony-tailed Charles Dance) who, in the film's most contrived narrative strand, uses hypnosis on her when she attends his surgery - with supposedly comic consequences. However, the movie's biggest miscalculation was to permit Tom Conti to indulge himself in the most ludicrous accented caricature we've seen since John Malkovich's Russian in Rounders.
Nevertheless, it's difficult to dislike this slender but good-natured and briskly-paced feel-good yarn which is as MOR as the hit singles its screenwriter, Geoff Morrow, wrote for Billy Fury, Cilla Black, Cliff Richard and Barry Manilow.
The Boys (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The title of the grim, uncompromising Australian drama The Boys refers to three brothers in a working-class Sydney family, and it's an apt title to describe three men who have never grown up. The focus of the film is on the eldest, most nihilistic of the brothers, Brett Sprague (David Wenham) who, as the film opens, is released from prison having served a sentence for assault with a deadly weapon.
The dysfunctional family is one of the most overworked themes in world cinema today, but the Spragues come close to being definitively dysfunctional, and Brett's return heightens the simmering tensions within his family. It doesn't help that he is violent, inarticulate, paranoid, racist, and Neanderthal in his attitude to women.
Adapted by Stephen Sewell from a recent stage play by Gordon Graham, and directed by Rowan Woods, the movie unwisely employs an elliptical, time-shifting structure which proves a self-defeating exercise and merely dissipates the claustrophobic drama. Although impressively acted by a cast that is mostly unfamiliar apart from Toni Collette, The Boys is an unremittingly bleak picture which does not compare in terms of substance or emotional involvement with such intense, similarly themed dramas as Once Were Warriors or Nil By Mouth.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Twenty-five years after it was first released and stirred up a welter of controversy, Tobe Hooper's repellent first feature, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is re-issued in a new print. This tacky, low-budget movie is a calculated shocker, a blood-splattered yarn of stupid American teenagers who fall foul of a grotesque, cannibalistic family in rural Texas.
The film has been interpreted as a forceful fable extolling vegetarianism, given the manner in which the hapless teens are treated like animals - slaughtered for public consumption, their bodies mutilated, hung up on meat-hooks and placed in a freezer. A few critics described the movie as a masterpiece of the horror genre when it was re-released in Britain recently. but such acclaim is to vastly overestimate a movie which, above all, is consistently disgusting.
Anthea McTeirnan adds:
Jack Frost (PG) General release
Like a spoonful of sugar and a dose of nasty medicine, this movie really needed that period of emotional dysfunction known as Christmas to make it at all palatable. Missing the boat by two months, Warner Brothers should now pray for a cold snap and hope that there is still a little festive goodwill left in the hearts of the movie-going public. That, however, is unlikely to be the case as Michael Keaton leads a cast struggling to breathe life into a barely disguised educational video for bad fathers. The moral of the tale - and if you're a single mother working hard to bring up a son without the involvement of his father, this film is best avoided - is, and I quote: "Snow dad is better than no dad".
If you can suspend your disbelief for a moment, the plot goes something like this . . . Jack Frost, a middle-aged, irresponsible musician who is still dreaming of making it big, has little time for his wife Gabby (the lovely Kelly Preston) or his son Charlie (Joseph Cross). Naturally, Charlie grows tired of his father's broken promises, especially when Jack chooses to play a gig for a record company on Christmas Day when he has promised to spend it with his family.
Jack finally sees sense, but fails to make it home after his car crashes in a blizzard and he is killed. A year later, Jack Frost returns . . . as a snowman. Not just any old snowman, either, but a walking, talking snowman who has spent the last year reading everything St Peter has in his library on fatherhood - a "new snowman", if you will. Charlie overcomes his initial terror and gradually father and son get down to some serious male bonding. There are probably two schools of thought on this one. All you not-good-enough fathers out there: get ready for some remedial education. All you good-enough fathers: take your son to the park to feed the ducks. You don't need this slush.
Madeline (Gen) General release
This time, canonisation may be the only appropriate reward for Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand. With another understated but truly mesmerising performance, McDormand does for nuns what the late Peter Mandelson did for the British Labour Party - and it's a revelation.
"In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines, lived 12 little girls in two straight lines"; so begins Ludwig Bemelman's enchanting tale of Madeline, the young orphan girl growing up in a small school in Paris in the 1950s.
Adapted from the books, many children will already be familiar with the quaintly-animated cartoon version. This movie loses nothing in the translation.
McDormand is truly splendid as Miss Clavelle, the kindest nun to hit the big screen since Maria Von Trapp welched out of her vows in The Sound Of Music.
Hatty Jones is an enchanting, spirited Madeline, who will no doubt become a role model for little girls fond of saying "Pooh" and who believe, as Madeline does: "I can do anything".
Clare Thomas is delightful as Madeline's best friend Aggie, in fact all 12 little girls turn in exceptional performances from their "two straight lines".
The school's spirited housekeeper Helene adds warmth and comedy, Nigel Hawthorne adds gravitas as Lord Covington and the story-line keeps the film chugging along nicely. Truly one to treasure.
