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The 24th edition of the festival kicks off on a spooky note on Halloween with Aislinn Clarke’s Irish horror, Fréwaka.

With 25 premieres and three world premieres the programme also features a mix of classics including The French Connection as part of the Art of Action strand. One of many eagerly anticipated films includes Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, Rumours and the latest from legendary director Mike Leigh, Hard Truths.

As part of the festival will be a special 40th Anniversary screening of Anne Devlin after which a Q&a with director Pat Murphy and star Brid Brennan. The festival will close with Sam O’Mahony’s The Wise Guy.

In Conversation event this year will see Bff curator Jessica Kiang chat with Radu Jude, Golden Bear winning director of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.

With an exciting and varied programme, festival director Michele Devlin...

Cph:dox, the Danish documentary film festival, has cancelled its opening night gala after Denmark’s government responded to the growing spread of coronavirus by asking organizers to pull events featuring more than 1,000 people. The event had been due to kick off with a screening of Kenneth Sorento’s The Fight For Greenland. The festival will otherwise go ahead as planned, with heightened hygiene procedures, unless the government introduces more severe measures to combat Covid-19, organizers said in a statement today.

This year’s Dublin International Film Festival closed over the weekend, with John Connors’ debut feature documentary Endless Sunshine On A Cloudy Day scooping the audience award. Phyllida Lloyd’s Herself, which premiered at Sundance, closed the festival as a gala screening and also took the Human Rights Film Award. Actor Liam Cunningham received the inaugural Lifetime Contribution Award. Elsewhere, Milje Li’s Confucian Dream won in the Documentary Competition,...

Danny Boyle is finally talking about James Bond. The filmmaker exited the film in August of last year after months of chatter about his involvement, and production is currently underway with Cary Fukunaga as director and “Fleabag” creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge as a script polisher. The Brit breakout has intimated that the bulk of her work on the script isn’t just to add a “female voice” to the continued adventures of the super-spy and his various female cohorts, but instead to liven up the entire enterprise.

Now, Boyle has indicated that he wouldn’t have gone that route. In a new interview with The Independent, Boyle was asked about the lack of female characters across his entire filmmaking canon, including his new release “Yesterday,” out later this week. On some level, it’s an unfair question: While Jacob Stolworthy writes that, of Boyle’s films, “only one has...

This unfortunately named British-Irish co-production has nothing to do with that ubiquitous ship but is rather the latest in what seems like an unending stream of films dealing with what are known as "The Troubles".

Set in 1972 Belfast, "Titanic Town" concentrates less on the conflict between the British government and the IRA than about the plight of ordinary citizens affected by the struggle.

A fictionalized version of an apparently true story, it features a powerhouse performance by Julie Walters as a mother and housewife who single-handedly decides to start a crusade to stop the violence. The film, well-directed by Roger Michell ("Persuasion"), was recently showcased at the Montreal World Film Festival.

Walters plays Bernie McPhelimy, who lives with her ulcer-suffering husband and four children in a West Belfast suburb that has become a daily battleground. One night, when a gunfight breaks out literally on her front lawn, she bursts out of the house in her night dress and proceeds to berate the startled IRA gunman. Bernie is the kind of woman who, when her house is being searched by British soldiers, is most concerned about the beds not being made.

When one of her good friends is hit by a stray bullet while walking Bernie's young son through a town square, the apolitical Bernie decides to get involved. She quite sensibly thinks that the violence should be restricted to the nighttime hours when children are home in bed. She attempts to organize the neighborhood women, but when she makes some abrupt comments on the evening news, Bernie is treated with suspicion by her friends and neighbors, who see her as a traitor to the cause. Before long, she has become a negotiating tool between the IRA and the British government and begins a petition to call for an end to the violence. Meanwhile, her 16-year-old daughter, Annie (Nuala O'Neill), becomes involved with a young medical student who turns out to be not exactly who he says he is.

The film does an admirable job of presenting a human face on the complicated situation, even if by this point we've become inundated with cinematic treatments of the subject. Anne Devlin's screenplay, based on Mary Costello's autobiographical novel, manages to deliver an effective blending of drama with welcome doses of humor, presenting vivid personalities and a clear explication of the sometimes complicated events.

The true anchor of the film, however, is Walters' full-blooded performance; her Bernie is a marvelous combination of bluster and vulnerability, of absurdity and steely determination. Also fine are Ciaran Hinds as her exasperated but loving husband and O'Neill as the daughter trying to deal with the demands of budding adulthood as well as her mother's political crusade.

TITANIC TOWN

Pandora Cinema

Director: Roger Michell

Screenplay: Anne Devlin

Producers: George Faber, Charles Pattinson

Executive producers: David Thompson, Robert Cooper, Rainer Mockert

Director of photography: John Daly

Editor: Kate Evans

Music: Trevor Jones

Color/stereo

Cast:

Bernie McPhelimy: Julie Walters

Aidan McPhelimy: Ciaran Hinds

Annie McPhelimy: Nuala O'Neill

Thomas McPhelimy: James Loughran

Sinead McPhelimy: Elizabeth Donaghy

Dino/Owen: Ciaran McMenamin

Running time -- 101 minutes

No MPAA rating...