Film reviews: Trad is a toe-tappingly delightful from start to finish
Irish trad isn’t just a music genre, according to Lance Daly’s 'Trad' (15A), but something deeper and perhaps even mystical: ‘A way, a path.’
★★★★★
Irish trad isn’t just a music genre, according to Lance Daly’s (15A), but something deeper and perhaps even mystical: ‘A way, a path.’ Such profundities are lost on Shona McAnally (Megan Nic Fhionnghaile), a teenager reared in the Donegal Gaeltacht and an award-winning fiddle player who has grown weary of trad music being deployed as bait to lure the tourists into the pub for yet another interminable session orchestrated by her mother (and teacher) Valerie (Sarah Greene).
When a raggle-taggle band of musical gypsies led by Harky (Aidan Gillen) arrive in Shona’s village, the opportunity to step off the conventional trad path presents itself — but is Shona really prepared to throw away a promising future for the lure of the road less travelled?
A coming-of-age story blended into a road movie undertaken by the Irish equivalent of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, Trad is a delight from start to finish, with Megan Nic Fhionnghaile a revelation in her first starring role.
A superb musician in her own right, Nic Fhionnghaile dominates proceedings as the gawky, rebellious teen kicking against the pricks and determined to live her life according to her own lights.
Caustic, independent, bilingual, and prickly, Shona is as authentically Irish as the traditional music she gradually begins to fall in love with again. There’s a strong supporting cast too — Aidan Gillen is good fun as the semi-stoned Pied Piper, Sarah Greene is a persuasive martinet as Shona’s domineering mother, and Cathal Coade Palmer is a tender-hearted foil to Shona’s single-minded rejection of tradition in all its forms, romance included — and the music, via a number of jams and sessions, is toe-tappingly brilliant.
All told, Lance Daly’s Künstlerroman is one of the most enjoyable movies released so far this year, Irish or otherwise.
★★★☆☆
(PG) stars Hugh Jackman as George Hardy, a shepherd living in rural England who has the odd habit of reading detective stories to his sheep by way of a bedtime story.
When George is discovered murdered one morning, the devastated flock — led by Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus), Mopple (Chris O’Dowd), and Sir Ritchfield (Patrick Stewart) — set out to solve the mystery of who killed their gentle George. Adapted from the best-selling novel by Leonie Swann and directed by Kyle Balda, The Sheep Detectives is a Miss Marple mystery given a significant ovine twist, as Lily & Co effectively steer the hapless local police officer Derry (Nicholas Braun) and the hard-nosed solicitor Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson) through their investigation.
All of which is totally preposterous, of course, but if you’re willing to play along with the premise, the movie is a charmingly inoffensive affair that bumbles along offering slapstick humour and plenty of in-jokes for fans of the golden age of mystery novels.
★★★☆☆
(15A) is a frills-free documentary about the London-based metal band that came of age in the 1970s by ‘defying the system’, a philosophy devised by founder-member and bassist Steve Harris that has seen Iron Maiden outlast most of their peers.
The central theme of Malcolm Venville’s film is that Maiden devotees aren’t simply fans but members of a global family, a claim backed up by the talking heads who show up to pledge their allegiance, a diverse bunch that includes Chuck D, Lars Ulrich, Gene Simmons, and Javier Bardem.
Perhaps the most surprising revelation is that the band members are ‘shy’, which is why Harris, Bruce Dickinson and Nicko McBrain et al don’t appear on-screen as they are now, but instead deliver voiceover commentaries contextualising the band’s ups and downs as we watch backstage home movie clips and video recordings of the band in their onstage pomp.
The Iron Maiden family will flock to Burning Ambition in their droves, but this workmanlike film is unlikely to inspire a new generation of fans.
- All theatrical releases
