Pomona Rewind

Rachel Carey's hairdressing comedy 'Deadly Cuts' nipped in for a short back and sides when it was released in UK cinemas last year. Pitched somewhere between the humour of early Roddy Doyle and Brendan O'Connor, it didn't last long in English, Scottish and Welsh cinemas. A simple, foul mouthed, working class Dublin comedy, Carey's film made around £164,000 at the UK box office. It did well, however,  at the Irish box office - racing to number three in the charts in its opening week, just behind  'No Time To Die'  and 'Addams Family 2'. Carey's film also achieved the best opening in Ireland for a native film by a female director for 20 years. It was also the biggest opening for a domestically made movie since Lee Cronin's superb 2019 Wicklow horror film  'The Hole in the Ground' . 'Deadly Cuts' has since been acquired for distribution in South Africa, Australia and Spain where it will get a release on St Patrick's Day.

It's a measure of how far RTE drama has come that within weeks of being broadcast in Ireland, the thriller 'Hidden Assets' was snapped up by BBC4. A co-production with Screen Ireland, Screen Flanders and AMC's Acorn TV, its Irish and Belgian settings and its mix of English and Flemish speaking characters no doubt appealed to BBC4's programmers who have always had a penchant for European police thrillers. The central dynamic of a female Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) investigator from Ireland and a streetwise Belgian cop evokes memories of  'The Bridge '. However that formula is also fused with the forensic combing of financial accounts and the interrogative style of BBC1's corruption drama ' Line of Duty '. 'Hidden Assets,' it has to be said, doesn't come up to the standard of either of those shows. Nevertheless, it is a pretty decent stab at it. Angeline Ball plays Criminal Assets Bureau investigator Emer Berry who at the start of writ

Every now and again a film comes along where a performance is greater than the movie deserves. Meryl Streep's Oscar winning turn as Margaret Thatcher in  'The Iron Lady'  springs to mind. Max Von Sydow elevates the disappointing 9/11 tale  'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'  with his performance as a mute man known as The Renter. Alan Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham obliterates every other performance in the otherwise toe curling 'Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves'. We can now add to the list Nicole Kidman's Golden Globe winning turn as Lucille Ball in Aaron Sorkin's Amazon Prime flick 'Being the Ricardos'. Sorkin is unquestionably one of the best screenwriters around on the big and small screen. His mastery of zippy dialogue that packs a punch cannot be questioned. His three forays into the director's chair, however, suggest the transition to filmmaker has been a bit more bumpy.. Sorkin got off to an impressive start as a director wit

  Peter Bogdanovich packed more into his life before his twenties than many people achieve in a lifetime. A celebrated critic, actor, writer and director, he started acting aged 15 - performing 10 plays in 10 weeks with a professional theatre company in Traverse City in Michigan. By 16, he talked his way into studying acting in the celebrated Stella Adler Academy in his teens. By 19, he acquired the rights to a Clifford Odets play and directed it off Broadway. But that was Bogdanovich - highly ambitious, really focused and not afraid to fail. At one time compared to Orson Welles, he famously passed on 'The Godfather,' 'Chinatown,' 'The Exorcist' and 'The Way We Were' at the summit of his career in the 1970s. And like Welles, who he befriended and lived with for a period, success came early in his filmmaking career with many believing he peaked with his most celebrated film 'The Last Picture Show'.  Born in Kingston, New York in 1939, his father w