Birdman Among Trio Of Additions To Tullamore Weekend Cinema Schedule

Keaton in Birdman

By Justin Kelly

Birdman

The critically acclaimed Birdman is the headline addition to IMC Tullamore’s schedule this weekend, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s dark comedy is arriving to the Offaly cinema on the back of nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. The film boasts a stellar cast, including Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, and Naomi Watts.

The movie centres on Keaton’s character Riggan Thomson, a washed-up Hollywood actor famous for playing the superhero Birdman years earlier, who now must battle his egotistical demons to reclaim former glory on the stage. Thomson plots a rousing return to the limelight in a Broadway play, but has to balance family troubles and his own ailing conscience in the process. Keaton has been nominated for the Best Actor award at next month’s Oscars for his role in Birdman.

The supporting cast has also been recognised during awards season, with both Stone and Norton receiving Oscar nominations in the male and female Supporting Actor categories. Emma Stone, the rising female star of Hollywood, impresses as Thomson’s drug addict daughter, while Ed Norton plays a volatile method actor drafted into his Broadway play fold by Keaton’s character.

The Guardian reviewed the movie earlier this month: “Birdman is a hard movie to embrace unconditionally – it feels too knowing, too immaculately timed a display of mastery to really breathe. Even so, there’s plenty to enjoy and more still to admire,” Jonathan Romney wrote for the English broadsheet. “Birdman has wings, for certain, even if you find the feathers sticking in your throat now and then,” he added.

Birdman screens in Tullamore on Friday at 21:10pm and will remain in that single slot for the duration of its run.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

Colin Firth heads up the cast of Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service, and the British actor is joined on screen by Hollywood legends Michael Caine and Samuel L. Jackson.

Matthew Vaughn is the same director that brought audiences Kick-Ass and Layer Cake, and he has adapted Kingsman from Dave Gibbons and Mark Millar’s comic book series called ‘The Secret Service.’ The film follows veteran Kingsman secret service spy Harry Hart (Firth) as he recruits young streetwise Gary ‘Eggsy’ Unwin (Taron Egerton) as a possible Kingsman.

Meanwhile, Samuel L. Jackson’s character, a villainous millionaire, plots a murderous campaign against millions of people, and the Kingsmen led by Michael Caine are tasked with stopping the wealthy madman.

The sharply-dressed and gentlemanly Hart brings the espionage genre into the line of quick-witted comedy, while the plot packs in the action element. Mark Adams for the Mirror newspaper says “Colin Firth is completely at ease as the upper-class spy; Kingsman is a dazzlingly slick piece of bold and bloody entertainment, and while hefty in terms of running time at more than two hours, it packs in espionage action.”

However, The Guardian reviewed the film as “a James Bond pastiche in its bones, teeming with quips, easily dispatched henchmen and umbrella-derived weaponry.”

Kingsman: The Secret Service opens in Tullamore on Friday night at 20:30pm, and will run at the same time every night for the duration of its run there. There are also daytime showing on Saturday and Sunday at 14:40pm and 17:30pm.

Big Hero 6

The final film arriving at Tullamore this weekend is the family fun flick Big Hero 6, directed by Don Hall and Chris Williams. Big Hero 6 is a computer-animated superhero action-comedy produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios. It tells the story of a young robotics prodigy named Hiro Hamada who forms a high-tech team of superheroes to combat a masked villain.

This animated film has been a commercial success, already racking up almost $500 million at the Box Office worldwide, and it has also been nominated for the Best Animated Feature award at the 87^th Academy Awards, which take place at the end of February.

Writing for Forbes magazine, Scott Mendelson reviewed the film as follows: “Big Hero 6 is a perfect in-between entertainment/action film. It is a kid-friendly superhero adventure, something noticeably less violent and intense than the likes of Man of Steel or Guardians of the Galaxy, but no less exciting or action-packed. It is also a visually gorgeous and richly entertaining comic adventure movie.”

Big Hero 6 screens in 3D at 16:15pm on both Saturday and Sunday, while the 2D version will hit the screens at 18:45pm on Friday evening, and continues in that time slot each day for its residency at Tullamore. There are also supplementary 2D screenings on Saturday and Sunday at 13:45pm and 16:20pm.

American Sniper Among Four New Films Coming To IMC Tullamore This Weekend

Cooper playing Chris Kyle

By Justin Kelly

Offaly’s only mainstream cinema welcomes the likes of Bradley Cooper, Johnny Depp, Mark Wahlberg and Domhnall Gleeson to its screens this weekend.

IMC Tullamore has an exciting host of movies on the way, and the most high-profile of these is American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood, and starring Bradley Cooper. Cooper stars as real-life US sniper Chris Kyle who served a number of tours during the Iraq war. 

The movie follows him through his life on the frontline to the time spent with his family back home, and the moral wrangling his duty causes. He is tasked with hunting down an enemy sniper supremo who has killed a large number of his US colleagues. The New York Times reviewed the movie recently: “Less a war movie than a western – the story of a lone gunslinger facing down his nemesis in a dusty, lawless place – American Sniper is blunt and effective, though also troubling.”

On the other hand, The Irish Times have said Clint Eastwood “misses his mark” with American Sniper, and described the movie as “a complete muddle.” Nonetheless, the movie has sparked debate in America with high-profile stars like Michael Moore saying it glorifies war, and promotes Islamophobia. Others, like politician Sarah Palin argue that people of Michael Moore’s standpoint are disrespecting America’s “war heroes.”

The movie screens in Tullamore, starting on Friday at 18:05pm and 20:50pm.

Ex Machina is the directorial debut of British novelist Alex Garland. Garland is famous for writing The Beach, a 1996 novel that was made into a 2000 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. He has also worked as a producer on movies like 28 Weeks Later in 2007, and Dredd in 2012.

Ex Machina is a sci-fi thriller that tracks a young computer coder (Domhnall Gleeson) as he heads to the mountain home of his boss, where he has to participate in an unusual experiment involving a new brand of artificial intelligence. Robbie Collin of The Telegraph wrote about Ex Machina recently, and he said: “This is bewitchingly smart science fiction movie of a type that’s all too rare. Its intelligence is anything but artificial.”

Ex Machina begins screening on Friday at 18:45pm, and then again at 21:05pm.

Following the success of his recent appearance in the Academy Award nominated Into The Woods, Johnny Depp makes a quick return to our cinema screens in Mortdecai. 

Depp plays a stylish art dealer who must search the world for a painting that bears the code of a missing bank account. The charming Charlie Mortdecai must fend off Russian criminals, British MI5 operatives, and an international terrorist in his hunt to recover the precious canvas.

Depp is flanked by an impressive cast, which includes Ewan McGregor, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jeff Goldblum. The film is receiving mixed reviews, but Scott Mendelson of Forbes magazine says that “Mortdecai works as a low-stakes comic mystery that is refreshingly aimed squarely at adult moviegoers.” However, The Telegraph has described Johnny Depp’s latest offering as “psychotically unfunny,” predicting that “surely there won’t be a film worse in 2015.”

Mortdecai opens in Tullamore on Friday, screening at 18:30pm and 21:00pm.

The final movie making its debut in Offaly this weekend is Mark Wahlberg’s new crime drama, The Gambler. It is a remake of a 1974 film of the same name with an updated screenplay by William Monahan.

The movie follows a literature professor with a gambling addiction (Wahlberg) who racks up debts of $260,000 with the proprietor of an underground gambling ring. Wahlberg’s character is given seven days to pay the sum with a death threat on his head if he fails to do so. Intertwined with the lives of some of his students, Wahlberg attempts to retrieve the money through a series of risky betting schemes.

The Birmingham Mail called the film a “pointless remake,” while the New York Times bemoaned the fact that it seems to “have lost all that was good about the original.” The Telegraph drew some positives from the film, writing: “This is an advert-slick remake of a Karel Reisz thriller from the 1970s, but this new version, which veers some way away from the Reisz original, never works out why its lead character is a compulsive gambler. At least the plot adds up, and the gambling scenes are well-staged and gripping.”

The Gambler begins screening in Tullamore on Friday at 18:30pm and 21:00pm.