News

Peaky Blinders and Malignant star Annabelle Wallis is ready to join Jason Statham to co-headline the forthcoming action thriller Mutiny from Lionsgate. The hard-boiled project finds Statham producing through his newly established Punch Palace Productions banner alongside Marc Butan of MadRiver Pictures. Jean-François Richet directs Mutiny from a script by J.P Davis and Lindsay Michel.

When principal photography begins this fall in the UK, Mutiny aims to tell the story of Cole Reed, a man set up to take the fall after his billionaire boss is murdered in front of him. Fearing for his life, Cole goes on the run while trying to uncover an international conspiracy at the heart of the crime.

Of course, Annabelle Wallis is a seasoned actor with many memorable characters to her credit. She plays Grace Shelby in the BBC-Netflix series Peaky Blinders, Rebecca Crosby in one of my comfort watches, Tag, the character...

Irish short animation, 'Fear of Flying', has completed production in preparation for its premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh this July. Shot at Dublin-based South Studios, 'Fear of Flying' was funded by the Irish Film Board's Frameworks project, with RTÉ and the Arts Council. Conor Finnegan wrote and directed the short, while Ifta Award-winning producer Brunella Cocchiglia (Foxes) produced for Lovely Productions, flanked by cinematographer Ivan McCullough (The Eclipse). Mark Doherty (A Film with Me in it) voiced main character Dougal, while breakout actress of 'Behold the Lamb' Aoife Duffin co-starred...

★★☆☆☆ Irish director Ian Fitzgibbon impressed us last year with Perrier's Bounty (2009), a darkly funny crime thriller which drew inevitable but fair comparisons with In Bruges (2008), amongst others. But this, his debut from 2008, has only just made it to this side of the Irish Sea: the cheekily titled A Film with Me in It (2008), starring Dylan Moran Fitzgibbon's first effort treads a roughly similar path to his second, but the tone is darker, the pace is slower, the budget is noticeably smaller, and the success rate is generally lower - still, it has its moments.

Writer Mark Doherty casts himself in the lead as Mark, a down-on-his-luck, out-of-work actor who can't get a break. The shy, nerve-ridden, softly spoken man is ignored by casting agents, nagged by his girlfriend and harassed by his landlord (an odd cameo from Keith Allen). His only friend is neighbour Pierce (the terrifically watchable Moran), a...

The interwoven kaleidoscope of the residents of a small east coast town and their familiar and relatable circumstances are explored in the socially conscious drama series River Ridge.

The fictional town of River Ridge serves as the landscape for a pleathora of tales, exploring the foundations of a community and its citizens. Distant sisters (Signy Coleman, Julie Pinson) confronting their dysfunctional past, lovers (Jon Prescott, Danielle Dilorenzo) who have lost their way, an economically plauged mother (Beth Ehlers) battling the unraveling affects of mental illness and the damaging influence it has on her children (Carrie Watt, Seth Ford), a couple (Shannon Sturges, Mark Doherty) threatened by their baggage attempt to keep their blossoming relationship intact, a star athlete (Matthew Daniell) struggling to define his indentity, and two teenagers (Matt McAbee, Christina Jackson) navigating unexpected love in the midst of intolerance and predjudice, create a patchwork of interconnected stories in this hyper-cinematic drama.

Ian Fitzgibbon's A Film With Me In It is a personal favorite of mine, a biting dark comedy that features a stellar performance from Dylan Moran (Shaun of the Dead, Black Books) as one of the leads.  IFC sat on this one in the Us for a good long time but it's finally available and they've finally cut a new Us trailer for it. The good news about the trailer: It's bloody hilarious. The bad news? It's pretty much entirely made of footage from the back half of the film, which means the way it presents the film is not exactly how the film actually plays out. But, you know, daddy's got to eat and this'll sell tickets.

Mark (Mark Doherty) is having a bad day. A struggling actor, he's just been through the ordeal of yet another fruitless audition for a bit part in a movie. With his...

It's tempting to lump Ian Fitzgibbon's A Film with Me in It in with a comically Grand Guignol-thriller like Shallow Grave. Or the plays (and film) of Martin McDonagh. But it would be wrong. For, while there is violence galore in A Film with Me in It, the lion's share is accidental. No, really -- they were accidents. That's the joke in this blackly humorous Irish film, which stars the film's writer, Mark Doherty, and stand-up comic Dylan Moran. People drop dead at an alarming rate in this movie -- and the deaths are unbelievably accidental, in the sense that so many bizarre accidents in so short a time simply has to look fishy to the authorities. So unemployed actor Mark (Doherty) and his would-be writer-filmmaker friend Pierce (Moran) must invent a set of circumstances that seem more likely than the freak occurrences...

With the 6th Annual Irish Film and Television Awards taking place this Saturday 14th of February, Irish and international guests gather in Dublin to honour Ireland's creative excellence and to celebrate the continued success of the film and television industry here at home. Among the Irish Nominees attending are Brendan Gleeson, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Aidan Gillen, Orla Brady, Eileen Walsh, Amy Huberman, Charlene McKenna, Deirdre O'Kane, Ger Ryan, Gerard McSorley, John Kavanagh, Maria Doyle Kennedy, David Herlihy, Hilda Fay and Lesley Conroy. Four of Ireland's rising starlets Saorise Ronan, Sarah Bolger, Jenn Murray and Kelly O'Neill will also attend the 2009 Awards, having received prestigious nominations in the acting categories. Others including Aidan Quinn, John Moore, Neil Jordan, Jim Sheridan, Eric Mabius, Fionnula Flanagan, Flora Montgomery, Jenny McAlpine, Steve McQueen and Katie McGrath amongst others. With 900 guests attending the Gala Ifta ceremony, the President of Ireland Mary McAleese...

SXSW is one of my favorite festivals of the year as it showcases some of the best and most innovative real independent films, and with this host of world premiers, it's also playing alot of Sundance material as well as genre fare from all over the world, many of which we've covered heavily in these pages.

From the Sundance lineup, we have films like Moon, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, You Won't Miss Me, Grace, and Humpday, among others.

For the world genre material we've covered, there's Lake Mungo, The Square, Zift, and Awaydays.

I think you get the point that lots of great looking film will be playing. I'll leave a bit of the exploration to you..

Lineup after the break.

Narrative Features Competition

Artois the Goat

Director: Kyle Bogart. Writer: Cliff and Kyle Bogart

Lab technician Virgil Gurdies embarks on an epic quest to craft the greatest...

Though it arrived at the Toronto International Film Festival as little more than a footnote in the massive program guide, a tiny film from Ireland that nobody paid much attention to before the fact, blacker-than-black comedy A Film With Me In It may very well end up departing as one of the fest’s big buzz titles, one of those left field arrivals that catches everybody off guard with it’s wickedly sharp sense of humor. The brainchild of writer-actor Mark Doherty - who stars in the film as a struggling actor named, conveniently enough, Mark - it is the deliciously mordant story of a man struggling to make it through the worst day in the history of all bad days with only the help of his perpetually inebriated would-be-screenwriter friend Pearce, played to perfection by Irish comic Dylan Moran (Shaun of the Dead, Tristram Shandy, Black Books).

When things don.t go our way in life - when we come to that rough patch or fall into that rut where nothing seems to work out, we all inevitably go through stages of self pity and ask questions like, .Could it really get any worse.? For Mark (Mark Doherty), life couldn.t get any worse. He.s an actor who can.t seem to impress anybody with his auditions, his apartment is literally falling apart and he.s behind on the rent, and his girlfriend Sally (Amy Huberman) is fed up and considering leaving him. Mark spends his days trying to coerce his writer best friend Pierce (Dylan Morane) to pen that .epic. movie that will propel them both to stardom. But Pierce is an alcoholic and a gambler, so the two friends merely waste away their lives only talking about doing something big, instead of actually attempting it.