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| 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.
