Margaret Thatcher faces the final curtain.

Some notes for those who may be unsure of some of the references. On Margaret Thatcher’s thriftiness and the similarity between gonks and Michael Hesseltine.

Films of the Year Archive
After a disappointing year in 2010, this year was considerably better at the movies. There were a number of big disappointments (I’m thinking mainly of Terrence Malick, Lynne Ramsay, Gus Van Sant, Steve McQueen and the Coen brothers) and some recently flourishing national cinemas (Taiwan and Germany in particular) were absent [...]

What do you get after mixing shining stars of the independent cinema, the Irish Film Bord, Huston School of Film & Digital Media, BFCE Irish School of Animation and the Film School in Lodz? A dynamo playground for filmmakers.Play Poland - Irish/Polish Film Project is a unique festival celebrating independent Irish and Polish film art. [...]

Play Poland - Irish-Polish Film Project is a unique festival platform for Irish-Polish filmmakers,
students and cinema lovers that will take place in Dublin in July 2011. It is a part of the biggest
Polish film festival in Europe, being run between May and September 2011.
This festival offers a creative mix of films, workshops and cinema posters. [...]

It wasn’t the greatest of years for cinema, to be honest, and it’s hard to figure why, unless the planets pulled sufficiently at once to put filmmakers from Buenos Aires to Tokyo to Rome sufficiently off their game. There were certainly no more bad films than usual out there this year (though certainly more than [...]

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, edited by Slavoj Žižek (Verso)
Hitchcock, piece by piece, by Laurent Bouzereau (Abrams)
Alfred Hitchcock Masters of the Cinema, by Krohn (Phaidon)
Hitchcock 14-Disc Box Set (Universal Pcitures)

Like a biro that leaks into a valued item of dress, some things [...]

An interview with filmmaker Eamonn Crudden
This interview is was originally published on media bite. You can watch the three parts of the Wallets Full of Blood trilogy here: Houses on the Moon , Zombie Banker Blues ,  Roscommon Death Trip
A compelling narrative of Ireland’s crisis of capitalism is very difficult to find. Those provided by [...]

As you are probly know if you are a funky culture vulture with your fingers in the pulses, peoples everywhere are rave about the new blue movie Atavar, by Irish director James Cameron, mostly because it is in three dimensions, going not only up and down the screen and both ways across the screen but [...]

The top ten for the decade - or, as the more observant will notice, a top 12 - a miscalculation resulted in there being more left at the end than I originally thought. But none of these films could be left out and there’s no obligation to stick too closely to the rules. So here [...]

The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismäki - Finland, 2002)
Kaurismäki narrowly missed out on both the Palme d’Or and Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for this film in 2002 but it deservedly made him known to a wider international audience. A man is brutally beaten in a mugging and wakes up with no recollection of [...]