(First published by Headstuff.org)

 

 

Sorry, Baby (dir. Eva Victor, 2025) 

 

A time-hopping dramedy from first-time director Eva Victor, Sorry, Baby may resonate among feminists in the USA: as a reminder of the force and pertinence of the #MeToo movement, at a time when these seem to have been derailed by the current president and the toxic politics he arguably represents.

 

The movie is grounded in the friendship of college housemates, Agnes (also Eva Victor), who is non-binary, and Lydie (Naomi Ackie), skipping between scenes from their university days and episodes from their present, adult lives. Beneath the surface-vivacity of the friends' relationship, we soon learn, lies Agnes's persisting trauma – which only Lydie knows about – after surviving an aggressive sexual assault by a trusted, and generally beloved, academic mentor as a graduate student. Now working in the same university, Agnes struggles to balance the enjoyment they draw from their job as a lecturer against the pain and upset of that earlier experience, which continues to haunt them. Victor conveys these ambivalent, contradictory emotions with grace and precision, and – perhaps surprisingly – is often funny in the process.

 

Not everything, however, holds together as tidily as we might like. Set in a university town in New England, where money is assumed and every other passer-by appears to have literary ambitions, the world of Sorry, Baby feels stagey and closed. Even as Victor brings candour and subtlety to their portrayal of life in the aftermath of an ugly violation, an air of privileged insularity lingers around Agnes and their friends, who conduct their conversations with a laconic neediness that never lets up. Writing a thesis, watching a movie, eating dinner, reading a book, going to the bathroom, going for a walk, all become occasions for self-curation and self-commentary. These are neurotic, privileged people, who seem to live only for and with themselves – a project jolted off-course by the central trauma, which Agnes refers to repeatedly as “The Thing”.

 

The latter's weighty presence throughout moves Victor's script into the dramatic orbit of Kitty Green's The Assistant (2019), while the in-jokey dialogue between Lydie and Agnes seems to pull in the opposite direction – towards the yammering quirkiness of Frances, Ha (2012), say, or Maggie's Plan (2015), films that have a fluency and warmth often lacking in Sorry, Baby. The resulting melange is a little odd, as humour is dampened by self-absorption, while a somewhat depressive atmosphere reminds us of the shock and numbness still felt by Agnes.

 

At its best Sorry, Baby manages to be both unsettling and vulnerable, compassionately navigating its way through difficult themes. For this, Eva Victor – who previously has worked as both a magazine editor and a comedian – deserves credit a-plenty. Hopefully they'll have a bright future, whether as writer, director, or star.

 

 

Christy (dir. Brendan Canty, 2025)

 

Christy is a brilliant film: a street-savvy ballad of life on the edge, flush with the unfakeable, unmistakable pizazz of its place and moment. Set and shot in Knocknaheeny, a working-class housing estate in Cork city, Brendan Canty's debut tracks the fortunes of the titular teenager (Danny Power) compelled to re-connect with his older half-brother Shane (Diarmuid Noyes) after being expelled from foster care. Attempting to find his tribe among the self-described “Norries” of his original home turf – an area he only half-remembers from childhood, when his mother was still alive – Christy wavers between living and surviving, as his future vacillates between uncertainties.

 

Backed by executive producer Yann Demange, previously associated as director with Top Boy (2011-2023) and '71 (2014), Christy shares with those vehicles a powerful and dynamic sense of young masculinity in flux, a theme balanced and grounded by a similarly potent feeling for place and social context. In this case, the script refuses judgement and sensationalism, preferring instead to sit with its central characters, allowing us to observe their situations and personalities in the round.

 

The cast is also excellent. With such an array of dramatic talent on show, it may be unfair to single out individual performaces for comment or commendation. Nonetheless, it's surely worth acknowledging just how sensitively the main relationship between Christy and Shane is conveyed by Power and Noyes; the brothers' combustibility and quiet current of mutual loyalty are plausible and vivid throughout. The members of The Kabin Studio community rap group likewise prove to be as natural and engaging on-screen as they are on-air, while Lewis Brophy brings soft gravitas to the role of Troy, Christy's swaggering, quietly desperate cousin, hoping to break free from his abusive older brother, a local drug-dealer.

 

Whereas The Young Offenders (2018-) maintains a tone of noisy pastiche in its approach to broadly similar subject matter, Christy grants its characters – and the wider community it portrays – enough depth and complexity as to feel dramatically real, rather than just straight-forwardly entertaining. Scurrilous and often hilarious though it is at times, Canty's film-novella of his slangtastic hometown is no piss-take. Quite the opposite. Every scene is lit with love and admiration for Christy and his crew, who emerge, despite all the pressures and conflicts of their world, as authentic heroes, keeping each other going against the odds – which are considerable. Like Frank Berry's Michael Inside (2017), Christy remains movingly sensitive to its adolescent protagonist, even as it faces up to the punishing realities (of poverty, homelessness, hopelessness, trauma) that too many young people are forced to cope with in Irish society, despite media reports of unprecedented national prosperity.

 

For all its sharpness and intensity, Christy has kindness at its core. A bright-shining triumph: everyone should see it.

 

 

On Swift Horses (dir. Daniel Minahan, 2024)

 

Pretty 1950s couple Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Lee (Will Poulter) decide to pack up their things and move to California; Lee's enigmatic brother, the mostly topless Julius (Jacob Elordi), may or may not join them. Lee and Julius, incidentally, are both veterans of the Korean War, although neither says or remembers much about it. Muriel has a rebellious, exploratory streak, which the Californian desert seems to catalyse into life. Nothing unpredictable happens; subtlety withers in the studio lighting. This is On Swift Horses, a movie to be gotten through rather than relished.

 

Carol (2015) and The Hours (2002) seem to be precursors to the kind of film that director Daniel Minahan wants to make. For all its meticulously curated Americana, however, his picture has little of the depth or interest that those films achieved. The reigning tone is one of mild, melodramatic seaminess that seems, in the end, too squeaky-clean and shiny to be either entertaining or real. Every significant character turns out to be an orphan. The entire troupe, except for Will Poulter's Lee, is on a journey of sexual, quickly triangulated self-discovery. Aside from occasional nods to the existence of Mexican street-hustlers on the Californian streets, there is barely a trace of racial tension in the America of the 1950s that Minahan conjures up. 

 

It's as if Norman Rockwell was a gambling addict who spent his off-hours reading Howl for kicks. Maybe he was, and maybe he did. Here, the melange is less than persuasive: the horse-racing and casino segments are low-energy at best, and the same is true of the depictions of queer love and Beat-style independence sizzling just below the surface of home-owning heteronormativity in the Sunshine State. There are times when we seem to be watching an earnest, heavily stylized school play, in which diligent youngsters offer studied variations on classic performances they once saw on-screen. There are also moments when we're not sure if our protagonists are about to cry or to yawn. 

 

It should be said that the crowd-pleasing cast may not be entirely the right fit for the roles involved. Jacob Elordi, an Australian, dusts off his Elvis voice and offers a soporific imitation of James Dean. Londoners Daisy Edgar-Jones and Will Poulter adopt routine, stage-American accents, while working hard to evoke what always feels like somebody else's idea of nostalgia. Poulter – who has some of the muscled sincerity and fresh good looks of Matt Damon in his younger years – is allowed a moment of vague complexity near the close: when we finally see that Lee, for all his squareness, does indeed love and understand his wife, just as he did his brother growing up; he just doesn't have the language to express what he feels. The most natural performance in the film is probably Kat Cunning's, as Gail: a fleeting love-interest and fellow traveller of Muriel's, gone almost as soon as she arrives.

 

On Swift Horses is mainly a mixture of silly and watchable: cinema as background-entertainment, for people not quite sure what they're feeling sentimental for today.

 

 

Gerry Adams: A Ballymurphy Man (dir. Trisha Ziff, 2025)

 

If the cynical antics of Keir Starmer earlier this year are to be believed, Gerry Adams continues to divide opinion. In contrast to the British Prime Minister, veteran journalist Ed Moloney observed that for his crucial role in negotiating the Belfast Agreement, the Sinn Fein leader should have been co-recipient (with John Hume and David Trimble) of the Nobel Peace Prize. Nell McCafferty likewise praised him for his “moral courage”, suggesting that he was “an example to us all.” For Eamonn McCann, more stingingly, “unsentimental pragmatism” is one of Adams's defining features: only a “political genius”, McCann once wrote, possessed of “guile and daring”, could have “contrived a realignment of republican ideology” as Adams had done, “so as to bring it more closely into kilter with the people in whose name it was purporting to act, offering no challenge to their consciousness.” 

 

For many hostile commentators, of course, no amount of “realignment”, nor indeed any of the considerable efforts Adams put into peace-making, will suffice: Adams, and Sinn Fein more broadly, still draws the ire of politicians and pundits for whom historical republican violence apparently retains a uniquely reprehensible aura. Curiously, the crimes committed by the British army in the same period, and the allegations of collusion between British security services and loyalist terror-gangs, seem to have done little to hinder the subsequent careers of key (arguably culpable) military figures, whose list of plaudits and honours invariably runs long. Adams – as viewers of the series Say Nothing (2024) will know – insists that he was never a member of the Provisional IRA.

 

Filmed over a five-year period, Trisha Ziff's Gerry Adams: A Ballymurphy Man grants the nationalist leader an opportunity to put his own stamp on the narratives surrounding his life and political career. The documentary features reminiscences of “Granny Adams”, her love of books and deep knowledge of Irish history, as well as wider descriptions of life in the working-class Ballymurphy area during Adams's boyhood. Adams recalls his positive experiences working, aged fifteen, as a bar-man in a unionist pub (the local patrons, he tells us, were “salt of the earth”), even as he describes the increasingly violent sectarianism that marred and structured life in the North – as highlighted by the Civil Rights demonstrations of the late 1960s and after. If this is first and foremost a (self-)portrait, we quickly understand, in the North of Ireland, like anywhere else, the personal and political cannot but overlap. When Bobby Sands died on hunger strike, Adams reminds us, he lost not only a political comrade, but a friend (from “Cage 11” in Long Kesh, where both young men had been interned without trial in the early 1970s).

 

“You wouldn't be a thinking person”, Adams says, if you didn't “have doubts” or “regrets” about “the struggle”, and he now believes “the IRA was not right all the time”: the closest his critics will come by way of an apology or personal concession, at least in this film. Rather, what most abides, for Adams, is his sense of “outrage” over the continued partition of Ireland and the long history of colonialism of which it forms a part. For him, republicanism remains a matter of “the reconquest of Ireland by the people who live here”, of all creeds and none. “Politics”, he further suggests, “is not worth anything unless it empowers people” – an aphorism deliberately couched in the language of liberal democracy, even as it appeals to the kind of communal consciousness shared and cultivated in republican circles. He is, he assures his audience, “a team-player”, and always was. 

 

As an interviewee, Adams can be canny as well as candid: he remains on-message, but also has enough wit and tactical perception to recognise the necessity of making that message more accommodating and ambiguous, as circumstances require. Any ambitious member of Ireland's diplomatic corps would do well to study this balancing-act, which is often masterful to watch. Adams, it should be said, is often funny and affable in conversation.

 

The peace of 1998 could not have happened without Gerry Adams. The decolonization of the island of Ireland – firstly, and principally, through an end to partition – has yet to be effected. The final chapter of Adams's legacy, in other words, has yet to be written. Let time be the judge.

 

 

The Swallow (dir. Tadhg O'Sullivan, 2024)

 

Taking its title from a fairy tale by Oscar Wilde, The Swallow might be thought of as a film-poem or imagined memoir, rippling with emotion even as it unfolds quietly, as though in meditation. Playing – we're led to understand – a version of herself, Oscar-winner Brenda Fricker wanders the Clare shoreline near her home, observing the changing seasons and flowing weathers, while intermittently writing letters to a departed loved one, whose absence, strangely, takes on a ghostly presence as the film develops in its own time, like a vivid polaroid from a forgotten era. The pace is slow, and the atmosphere sometimes mournful. Fricker, however, infuses each scene with feeling, and sometimes humour, sustaining a tone of thoughtful understatement that settles like a spell. Watching The Swallow is a curiously entrancing experience. 

 

Like The Writing in the Sky (2011), centred on the life and words of poet Dermot Healy in Sligo, Tadhg O'Sullivan's portrait balances a close attention to the sea-wild rhythms of its setting with a rich, absorbing sense of art and memory as intertwined human processes. Remembrance might be thought of as the defining theme of The Swallow; the fact that the original relationship, with its lingering hopes and disappointments, is never fully revealed to us only heightens the hypnotic effect of Fricker's recollections, which we receive in oblique fragments rather than in the round. 

 

Another documentary that shares some of these qualities is Who is Dervla Murphy? (2010), about the eponymous travel writer. Fricker has a good deal of that figure's warmth on-screen, as well as the same rough voice and stoical demeanour, which draw the audience in. The Swallow, of course, is semi-fictional, and serves as much as a reflection on solitude as a revelation of a working artist. There are moments when this seems to limit or confine the scope of Fricker's portrait; very few of us, after all, are entirely alone, living only with our private thoughts and memories, interacting with nobody but the dead. As an attempt to render the feeling and experience memory cinematically, however, O'Sullivan's film is special, and intriguing.

 

At a lean running-time of one hour, The Swallow feels rooted and ethereal, a human love-story with little plot and only one teller: an exploration of mortality that manages to be both intimate and inscrutable. As soon as it finished, I wanted to watch it again. 

 

 

Spartacus (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1960)

 

Taking heart from the success of Ben-Hur (1959) the previous year, Spartacus (1960) aimed to offer audiences an epic evocation of ancient Rome from the vantage-point of its rebellious slave populations. Controversy accompanied it from the beginning. Three weeks into the shoot, Kirk Douglas, the film's producer as well as star, fired the director Anthony Mann and appointed a 30 year-old cinematic new-comer in his stead. The young Stanley Kubrick, who had directed Douglas in the the powerful anti-war drama Paths of Glory in 1957, was an independent outlier, and certainly had little of the big-screen experience of his predecessor: Mann had made a name for himself with gnarly, tough-eyed Westerns like Winchester '73 (1950) and The Naked Spur (1955), and would later go on to helm ambitious Hollywood history-plays such as El Cid (1961) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).

 

If Mann's sacking from set seemed to strike an unpromising note for the production to follow, Spartacus also carried commercial risk by association, having been co-written by Dalton Trumbo – one of the “Hollywood Ten” accused of Communist sympathies by the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose work had been shunned since the late 1940s. That Trumbo received a screen credit for his scripting, and the fact that he was hired in the first place, was due entirely to Douglas, whose combination of intransigence and political progressivism was vital to breaking the Blacklist.

 

Spartacus itself stands the test of time. The cast, as might be expected, is dazzling – and all the more so at a distance of 65 years. Co-writer Peter Ustinov takes an amusing turn as the slave-owner Batiatus, slimey and shrewd in his efforts – often vexed – to secure his own safety and comfort. Laurence Olivier, meanwhile, oozes haughty contempt as Crassus, the wealthy Roman military-man, who knows how to own, and command, and punish subversion, but has little capacity for love or human connection – as he discovers when he tries to woo the slave-woman Varinia, played by the dignified Jean Simmons. “In Rome”, observes the plotting senator Gracchus (portrayed with wizened wit by Charles Laughton), “dignity shortens life even more surely than disease”, a pithy remark that casts its own kind of illumination on why the slave revolt happened, while foreshadowing its result. 

 

Not insignificantly, Spartacus himself falls for Varinia, when, after howling in his cage, “I'm not an animal!”, she reminds him, “neither am I.” This is something of a motif in Trumbo's script. Forced into the role of a provincial gladiator for the amusement of visiting Roman elites, Spartacus first learns to focus and channel his rage when he witnesses the heroic individual actions of a Libyan captive (played by the quietly iconic Woody Strode), who attempts to use his military prowess to kill his overlords: he fails, but his example helps to catalyse the insurrection of his fellow slaves. The Spartacus rebellion, in other words, has its roots in the audacity and power of a black radical – an inflection subtly in tune with the Civil Rights struggles that had begun to re-shape public consciousness in the US from the mid-1950s onwards.

 

Spartacus is of its era – but also feels like one for the ages. In his later career, Kubrick would be lauded as a crafter of chilly masterpieces, mounting satirical or unsettling investigations into humankind's irrational mysteries. Here, admittedly, he shared creative control with Douglas, and so the tone of the film may not be entirely his own. Nevertheless it's the bright, technicolour passion of Spartacus that makes it so memorable.

 

 

I Swear (dir. Kirk Jones, 2024)

 

A promising soccer player and a friendly, easy-going teenager, John Davidson finds himself increasingly prone to physical and verbal outbursts that he cannot explain or control. His parents are confused, and less than sympathetic, while his disciplinarian school-teachers are skeptical. Davidson – we and he discover – is thought to be suffering from Tourette syndrome, an incurable condition, its symptoms including tics, anxieties, and obsessive compulsive behaviours. Based on a true story, I Swear offers a window into Davidson's long, difficult, but also (eventually) inspiring attempts to understand and adapt to these unexpected medical circumstances – helped and hindered by various personages in his local area. All of which risks over-explaining what is in essence a powerful and necessary film. 

 

If chat shows and award circuits are to be believed, Olivia Coleman seems to have been granted the status of national treasure – her brand of derangedly funny, fussy passive aggression now apparently deemed iconic. Maxine Peake, meanwhile, has been putting the work in, elevating feature-films such as Peterloo (2018) and Funny Cow (2017) with her natural, intelligent performances, taking on tv roles in Say Nothing (2023) and Black Mirror (2011-), appearing in a range of shorts, as well as providing the voice-over for the excellent documentary, Tish (2023). She is surely one of the most engaging talents working in British film and television today, and her contribution to this new drama – playing Dottie, mother of Davidson's friend and a former mental health nurse, who takes the young man under her wing – only adds to that impression.

 

The acting all-round is wonderful, including by the young Scott Ellis Watson in the opening segments. After treading water in Game of Thrones (2011-2019) and The Rings of Power (2022-24), in the lead role here Robert Aramayo is presented with a formidable challenge, which he meets and inhabits with visceral precision: his portrayal of Davidson's relentless struggle – his courage, and trouble, and decency – is delicate and wrenching. Not since Jack O'Connell's storming conquest of the British scene in films like Starred Up (2013) and '71 (2014) has an actor proven their mettle with such intensity and truthfulness.

 

It may be no small surprise that director Kirk Jones, the maker of Nanny McPhee (2005), opts to end on a feel-good note in the closing act. This is not necessarily to the bad. The fact that Matthew Warchus's Pride (2015), for example, sometimes traded in sentimentality did little to lessen its humanity and feist. I Swear might be thought of in a similar fashion: there's a familiarity to the narrative conventions it relies on, but Jones's movie has soul and grit in spades. Anyone with a heart will be moved by this story.

 

 

All About Eve (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz; 1950)

 

Released the same year as Sunset Boulevard, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's now-classic film also deals in themes of fame and glamour, artifice and mortality, held together and stung to raucous life by the tornado-glory of its leading lady – in this case, the incomparable Bette Davis. Concerning a celebrated Broadway actress and a wide-eyed admirer apparently intent on making herself amenable to the chaotic doyenne, All About Eve (1950) is scathing and delightful, a double-portrait – of ambition triumphant, and the precarity of talented people.

 

There are plenty in the film. Although typecast as a glamorous ingénue on display for the pleasure of older, influential men, Marilyn Monroe lights up the screen whenever she appears. Thelma Ritter, typically tough-talking and pragmatic, is also remarkable as the undeluded Birdie – maybe the only person in the movie who sees through the self-deceptions of her fellows without developing any of her own. Meanwhile George Sanders takes a splendid turn as Addison DeWitt, a droll, smoothly cynical theatre critic – or “venomous fish-wife”, as one character suggests – who smokes aristocratic cigarettes while dishing out cologne-scented aphorisms to anyone hungry for news or knowledge of the cut-throat cultural scene he knows only too well. Unlike Burt Lancaster's ruthless New York columnist, J. J. Hunsecker, in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), DeWitt, a skilled manipulator of people and the truths they claim to believe in, arguably has little in the way of homegrown malevolence in him: his bleak, unblinkered view of human nature is merely a result of his own keen and subtle talent for social observation. He expects so little of others, because he has been so repeatedly and profoundly disappointed by them. When he eventually finds himself  blackmailing Eve (played with glassy charm by Anne Baxter), his cunning condemnation of her duplicity is eloquent and knowing: “we deserve each other”, he says, wearing something close to a grimace on his face.

 

Bette Davis, of course, is stormy and magnificent as Margo Channing, a “star” who “never was nor ever will be anything else”, even as her younger, would-be competitor smilingly schemes her way into the spotlight that is Margo's by right. “Fasten your seatbelts”, shoots the elder diva to a room of watchful, admiring friends, “it's going to be a bumpy night!” This might be the unofficial motto of All About Eve. Davis, sublimely stroppy, somehow manages to exude riotous volatility and lofty glamour with every glance, conveying Margo's sass and vulnerability with a precision that feels utterly natural. That she was nominated for an Oscar without actually winning one still seems like an egregious blunder, even by the standards of an institution notorious for ignoring greatness in its midst.

 

One thing for certain is that age has done little to lessen the power of this harsh and tender film: after 75 years, All About Eve remains the cream of the crop.

 

 

Testimony (dir. Aoife Kelleher, 2025)

 

Since the Justice for Magdalenes campaign group was founded in 2003, Ireland has arguably undergone a transformation of public consciousness regarding the abuse of vulnerable women and children in Church-run, state-supported schemes and programmes – including Mother and Baby Homes, Magdalene Laundries, and industrial schools, among others. Woven together from interviews with survivors and advocates, Aoife Kelleher's documentary draws a connecting line between these coercive institutions and systems, while also sketching a portrait of Irish state that is – to put it mildly – fairly damning. 

 

After numerous official commissions and reports, too many (elderly or ageing) citizens who were traumatized in their youth are little closer to truth or redress than they were in 2009, when the Ryan Report, for example, lifted the lid of shame and silence on the question of the systematic abuse of children over the course of the twentieth century. That Report was commissioned in response to grassroots pressure for a national reckoning with historic crimes, which had been growing over the previous two decades. Then as now, the various expressions of governmental regret and condolence that have been issued were hard-won, and a long time coming.

 

Many of the religious orders implicated in the various scandals, meanwhile, have demonstrated their reluctance – or simply outright refused – to contribute to compensation schemes for victims. As historian Caitríona Crowe reminds us, campaigners today are working to restore dignity not only to survivors who are living and striving to have their voices heard, but to the dead – women and children who were damaged irreparably, or in some cases, after dying under the care of religious institutions, discarded in septic tanks and unmarked burial grounds. 

 

Kelleher, also director of One Million Dubliners (2014) and Mrs Robinson (2024), might be thought of as a people's historian or citizen film-maker: her work re-frames the stories the nation tells about itself, from the ground up. When the tendency from successive Irish governments seems to favour slow progress at best – or carefully worded obfuscation, confused policy responses, and divisive double-speak at worst – films like this keep the possibility of justice alive, even as they foreground the voices and perspectives of the people who suffered, and who later had the courage to detail their experiences in the open and set the record straight. The chronicle offered here is fuelled by empathy and coloured by pain, but Kelleher and her crew seem concerned with more than documentation: they are attempting, in their way, to pay tribute to the women and children who were put through hell, whom powerful interests would like us to forget. Testimony makes that forgetting less likely. Every Irish person should watch and learn from it.