Movie reviews

Cusack is suitably woebegone as the poverty-stricken Poe, the expression in his melancholy eyes constantly vacillating from depression to rage and perhaps even madness, and he gets strong support from Luke Evans as the dogged Detective Emmet Fields and Brendan Gleeson as the scenery-chewing Colonel Hamilton, father of Poe’s love interest, Emily (Alice Eve).

Unfortunately, and ironically, given Poe’s mastery of the classic detective tropes, the story quickly becomes an increasingly lurid and preposterously convoluted tale, in which the serial killer is — as always — infinitely resourced, fiendishly clever and insane enough to butcher innocent victims, yet sane enough to carry it all off without leaving so much as a single clue. Fans of full-blown gothic horror may well spontaneously combust with sheer glee.

A rather more sober historical piece, Stella Days (15A) is set in rural Tipperary during the 1950s. Fr Daniel Barry (Martin Sheen) is a parish priest and cinephile who yearns for the Rome he loved as a young man, but finds himself caught up in a never-ending fund-raising exercise when Bishop Hegerty (Tom Hickey) decides to build a new church. Determined to make the best of a bad lot, Fr Barry proposes opening a new cinema to raise money, a notion that puts him at cross-purposes with some of the more conservative elements in his parish. Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s Stella Days (which is adapted from Tom Doorley’s novel) could very easily have become an excessively ‘Oirish’ tale of innate conservatism, as represented here by the craw-thumping politician played by a constantly glowering Stephen Rea. Happily, Rea’s character is the only one-dimensional character on show: Fr Barry is a likeable protagonist, while the characters who ebb and flow around him are given enough facets to make them worth watching. Gentle in tone and humour, unfolding at a sedate pace, the film rewards patience as a thoughtful, questioning treatise on the nature of faith and personal fulfilment.