THOMAS POOL REVIEWS THE LIGHTKEEPER AT THE DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL.

A lighthouse is a lonely symbol. Often a shorthand in literature, art, and film, the lighthouse represents themes of isolation, caution, and, with each flash of its lamp, hope for a safe harbour. The Lightkeeper (2026) is a film that embodies that forlorn mixture of solitude and hope. In the Light House Cinema, however, it was quite evident that familiarity and community was all around.

The sold-out premiere of The Lightkeeper on 21 February, during the Dublin International Film Festival, was filled with many attendees personally attached to the film. Set on an unnamed island off Ireland’s west coast, the film was shot on location in Donegal. All around me in the theatre, excited Donegal accents flittered around in whispers, with cheers and applause sporadically peppering the showing whenever an extra was recognised. The cinema had the same warm air of fellowship that you’d find in a local theatre production, and there was a great sense of pride and community among the many friends, family, and neighbours in attendance.

Set in 1924, the film centres on Seamus Óg McGrinna, played by Dominic Cooper, who is a lonely man with a lonely profession – a lighthouse keeper. Having lost his wife and child, Seamus spends his free time drinking, and rowing out to sea, waiting for the malevolent spirit, the Each-Uisce (Water Horse), to drown him. However lonely he is, he is not alone. His housekeeper, Maire, played by Sarah Bolger, is deeply devoted and protective of Seamus, and, we suspect, very much in unrequited love with him. Seamus’s routine of drinking in the pub, ferrying himself back to the mainland to pick flowers from his deceased wife’s garden, and then heading back to place them on her grave, fastidiously updating his lightkeeper’s log book, and attempting to drown himself, is interrupted by the separate arrivals of an American widow and a hardline priest.

The priest, Father MacGabhann, played by Aidan Quinn, is the only man on the island with a car. The sputtering of his Oldsmobile, a harbinger of his impending arrival, warns the islanders to start acting piously. The conflict with Seamus begins when the priest enters the pub, his car out of petrol, to request a jerrycan from the barkeep. With a rather dour mass having just concluded, the priest admonishes the men to return home to their families. Seamus, having no surviving family, takes that as exemption – the priest, however, does not.

MacGabhann makes one wonder, what if Father Ted had ruled Craggy Island with an iron fist? Not particularly competent, compelling, or adored, MacGabhann sees Seamus as a figure of resistance – one that must be subdued, lest the rest of his flock begin to question his authority. The priest finds his opening when he discovers Seamus has buried his wife Bridget on the unconsecrated grounds of the lighthouse, next to a memorial for their son, Weeshie.

The American widow, Edith, played by Sarah Gadon, has come to Ireland to try and find a sense of closure. Her husband, a soldier, drowned off the coast of the island when his transport ship sank during a ferocious storm in WWI. Weeshie, it turns out, died that night as well, after he rowed out into the channel to rescue the survivors. Their shared loss from the same tragedy brings Edith and Seamus together, much to Maire’s pain.

The film leaves much unsaid, and the hints of conflict between ancient mythology and the Catholic Church never quite materialise. The power of the priesthood at this time in Irish history is not only political and cultural, but personal as well.

MacGabhann uses the church’s influence to force the hand of the lighthouse commissioners, who demand that Seamus reintern his wife’s remains in the consecrated cemetery. When he refuses, he is told he will be fired. Criticism of this power is ultimately diffused by the end of the film, when after leading a mob to the lighthouse to forcibly remove Bridget’s remains, MacGabhann relents after hearing the trio of pleas from Maire, Edith, and Seamus himself. An uneasy truce is brokered, and the grounds of the lighthouse are consecrated. Unable to let power go completely, MacGabhann gently reminds Seamus that he will now need to put a cross above the garden gate.

The film’s strength truly lies in its visual storytelling. The austere, sharp features of the Donegal coast are heightened by the superb cinematography of Vic Sarin, who is also the director. In one scene, the lighthouse itself, the only source of light at night, gently holds Seamus in a series of vignettes, as he slowly moves in its flashes. These lonely images of darkness and light would be marvellous additions to any photography museum if rendered into stills. At its best, the cinematography resembles Hungarian-American cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond’s work on The Deer Hunter (1978), echoing its use of natural light and expansive landscapes to shape a story about loss and moving forward after unfathomable tragedy.

In his final attempt to join his wife and child, Seamus is finally granted his audience with the shape-shifting spirit, Each-Uisce, who appears to him in the form of his son. Unlike in traditional folklore, where the water-horse drowns and devours its victims, Seamus is carried back up to the surface. As he pulls his skiff ashore, the lonely man at last finds the community that he had been longing for. Indeed, they were all around me in the theatre, roaring with applause.

Thomas Pool is the Content and Production Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet and the Commissioning Editor of the miniVAN.

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PAUL DUNNE REVIEWS NO ORDINARY HEIST AT THE DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2026.

Directed by Colin McIvor, No Ordinary Heist (2026) is a heist movie of small, deep settings with large stakes. Eddie Marsan and Éanna Hardwicke face off against each other as the film’s protagonists – Richard and Barry, respectively, who grew up on the same street, and whose fathers had a history. Now, Richard is a bank manager, while Barry is at the bottom of the corporate ladder, though crucially, he holds the keys to the bank vault. A drunken conversation in a seedy pub with a local criminal turns Barry and Richard’s worlds upside down, as their families become kidnapping targets, forcing the pair to pull off the heist.

No Ordinary Heist excels in its exploration of the human cost of criminality, and the set of conditions that would lead people to treat each other with hostility. The negative effects of capitalism, in which individuals feel they must compete for a dwindling pool of resources (in this instance, cold hard cash in the lead up to Christmas) are foregrounded and echoed by a bank robbery (based on a real event), set in Belfast in December 2004, just after the end of The Troubles.

This feeling of discomfort and desperation at the hands of an uncaring system ripples beyond the heist itself. Head security guard Mags (expertly portrayed by Michelle Fairley) is in a constant state of surveillance, not only over the safety of the bank, but her own job security. Meanwhile, Barry struggles to collect subs for his GAA team and Richard must decide who will lose their job just before Christmas. The Australian CEO of the bank doesn’t care who is sacked, whereas Richard must reckon with firing someone he sees every day.

There is a coldness that Director of Photography Damien Elliot exemplifies through long distance, aerial views of Belfast’s skyline and city streets. Fluorescent, blueish, artificial light floods most scenes set in office spaces. The mise-en-scène of each frame exudes feelings, more often than not, of tension and fear. McIvor contrasts homely, domestic interiors with the sterility of the modern bank. We are invited into the homes of Richard and Barry, where love and love-lost both flourish. The Troubles pervade these private settings, exposing the harsh and enduring impact of the conflict on many Northern Irish citizens. Not everyone gets the opportunity to rise up the corporate ladder, and not everyone has a loving home to return to; there are those for whom criminality is the only way to earn a living.

That is not to say that the film attempts to elicit sympathy with the bank robbers; rather that McIvor and Aisling Corristine’s script allows us to access broader, deeper depictions of Belfast beyond its bombings and headline-grabbing tensions. The everyday is at the forefront of this film. The routines we all go through to put food on the table get turned upside down by the bank robbers, as Richard and Barry must cooperate with evil and with each other – and at times, that proves to be the greater challenge. Richard is sceptical of Barry’s presumed innocence or potential involvement in the heist. Prejudice and discrimination linger, even though at the key moments of the film, Barry is the only person who can understand Richard’s predicament.

The decision to include an onscreen countdown and ticking clock in the film score provide constant reminders of what is at stake. Outmoded technology (such as old-school Nokias and landline telephones) tie both Richard and Barry to the bank robbers, while constant worry about phone signal pervades key moments, racketing up the tension.

One is reminded of films like Dog Day Afternoon (1975) or Collateral (2004), in which ordinary citizens get mixed up in extraordinary circumstances. Some find the ability to rise and deliver under pressure where others falter. The desperation of the bank robbers fuels their ingenuity to devise a heist where they never even enter the bank. There is something to admire in this creative and precise plan, which sits in contrast to typical plots of the heist genre, in which we often we see larger-than-life characters, wielding even larger guns, shoving stacks of money into gym bags before peeling off in a stolen vehicle. The calmness of execution and anonymity of the criminals (who are still at large to this day) is particularly appealing and fresh.

No Ordinary Heist is slated for general release on 27 March 2026.

Paul Dunne is a writer and a critic based in Dublin. His writing has appeared in The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices (Unbound, 2021), edited by Paul McVeigh.

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PAUL DUNNE REVIEWS THE MANDARIN-LANGUAGE FILM RESURRECTION AT THE DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL.

The science fiction drama, Resurrection (2025), is a fantastical, psychological exploration of the power and history of cinema. In the world of the film, dreaming has been made illegal, and as a result, everyone is now immortal. However, there are a select few, called deliriants, who choose to dream anyway, and are able to travel through time. At the risk of losing the reader in this complex synopsis, these bounds are simply a framing device that allows director Bi Gan to showcase, reflect, and comment on the role of cinema – and storytelling more broadly – in our lives.

Bi Gan chooses a fractal mode to convey a series of six sequences across five distinct settings. This includes mundane locations such as a busy train station, a dilapidated Buddhist temple, and a dockyard controlled by a criminal gang. There are four vignettes, or ‘dreams’, as we are invited into the minds of several deliriants, who use film to hide from the authorities that have outlawed dreaming. Each dream serves as a separate but connected parable in which the tenets of Buddhist thought are explored: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mind. There are various humorous moments that break the fourth-wall, reminding us that this is just a film, as wondrous and epic as it may seem. Bi Gan never forgets the pure, essential essence of cinema as a tool through which to delight, deceive, distract, and reflect us back to ourselves.

Each of the six sequences has its own visual and sonic identity that reflects cinematic innovations across history. We begin in the silent film era, with title cards and a grand orchestral score; there is no dialogue or colour. We then move to a grainy film reel, featuring cascading shadows and multiple shots within mirrors. In the second-last sequence, a 30-minute hand-held tracking shot follows the characters as they move through a world bathed in neon light, to the sounds of a distant rave on New Year’s Eve at the turn of the millennium, all choreographed with gritty perfection.

Dong Jingsong deserves special mention as the cinematographer. In charting the history of cinema, his deconstruction and re-construction of cinematic techniques and language is as bold as I have ever seen. He masterfully and gracefully handles techniques of surrealism, magical realism, stop-motion, and time-lapse as deftly as he does simple two-shot framing devices. It all feels truly collaborative, involving a high-level reading and understanding of Bi Gan’s direction, Zhai Xiaohui’s ambitious script, and the strong and subtle performances, which combine to make this a truly special film.

Resurrection is akin to other seminal works of speculative fiction, such as Stalker (1979) or Children of Men (2006), which portray how humanity survives an imminent dystopia, filled with meaningless wars, fascist bureaucracy, and cultural erasure. However, Resurrection is laden with a lightness, playfulness, well-timed humour, and narrative depth, to create intermeshed layers. This material is challenging yet inviting, experimental yet relatable, and there is a Lynchian quality to it all. For a film as intellectual and metatextual as Resurrection, I found it astonishingly enjoyable.

After seeing Resurrection, I am reminded of two quotes. The first from Bong Joon Ho as he won the Best Picture Oscar® for Parasite (2019): “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you’ll be introduced to so many more amazing films.” The second from David Lynch: “Now if you’re playing the movie on a telephone you will never, in a trillion years, experience the film.” Resurrection is a film that you really should see in the cinema. Yes, you must read the subtitles. And yes, the film is 2 hours and 40 minutes long. However, after ten minutes, you will melt into it. With each ‘dream’ being roughly 40 minutes, you are never far from a change of pace or direction. Resurrection is cinema-as-spectacle, and a fun and fitting tribute to the medium of cinema. In a time when streaming platforms and short-form algorithms have changed how we interact with all media, Resurrection is an epic worth seeing in a dark cinema, surrounded by fellow movie lovers.

Resurrection is slated for general release on 13 March 2026.

Paul Dunne is a writer and a critic based in Dublin. His writing has appeared in The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices (Unbound, 2021), edited by Paul McVeigh.

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CAILEIGH RYAN REVIEWS THE JAPANESE-LANGUAGE FILM, EXIT 8, AT THE DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL.

When someone gives you a Japanese horror film recommendation, it’s one of life’s greatest treats. Japanese filmmakers do it right and do it different, and the Dublin International Film Festival understands this. The Lighthouse Cinema was packed for the sold-out Irish premiere of Exit 8 (2025).

From the hubbub in the queue, it seemed the majority didn’t quite know what we were about to step into: “I don’t know, man, not sure what it’s about, but it’s based off a Japanese video game, I’d say it’ll be good.” The best way to view a new release. No hints, no expectations, just trust.

Public transit can be quite annoying at times. The noise of chatter, the too-hot discomfort of an overcrowded carriage at rush hour, the baby wailing in the background, the screech of wheels on tracks – until it all becomes too much and you blissfully mute the clamour by inserting a pair of earphones into your ears. Maybe you answer your phone when it rings, just to escape the background noise. Our protagonist, The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya), lives this same universal commute and does the very same thing. Exit 8 utilises everyday sounds as aural horror in a way I have never before experienced in film. We find welcome relief, silence and solitude as we follow The Lost Man off the train and into the quiet exit corridor, where he loses phone signal during a difficult and life-altering phone call. The relief lasts until we realise that we cannot exit easily. The use of noise was made horrific in such an impactful way, that I found myself reaching for the volume button on the remote I didn’t have. A cacophony of harsh, grating noises really intensified the uneasiness of the film.

Exit 8 is a film adaptation of the popular video game of the same name. You can complete the game quickly, or it can go on for a while. The duration of your journey to the exit depends entirely on how astute you are (and how well you can sit with feelings of uncertain anticipation and unease). The premise of both the film and game is the same: in order to depart the underground subway station, we must leave through Exit 8. To reach Exit 8, we must traverse a number of corridors that visually replicate each other, right down to the advertisements on the walls. We begin at Exit 0. What should be a straight-forward journey to Exit 8 is disrupted constantly by the rule: if you notice an anomaly, you must turn back. If you fail to notice an anomaly or fail to turn back, you find yourself back at Exit 0, and must repeat the process again, not knowing what to expect this time around.

This same intense, psychological second-guessing and maniacal determination to find intentional anomalies culminates in a film that leaves the viewer as invested as our protagonist, fearing what’s to come next, and doubtful that we will ever get out. The psychological tension throughout this film is intense.

I found myself so drawn to The Lost Man, despite his lack of dialogue. Ninomaya delivered an acting masterclass in this one. I empathised with him, grew frustrated with him, rooted for him, hoped for him, and walked with him. And walked with him some more. I walked with him for an hour and a half, actually. Not only do we walk with The Lost Man physically, but we also walk with him as he laments the possible outcomes of that life-altering phone call. At the beginning of this walk, I’m as undecided as he is, but find myself hoping that by the time we make it out of the exit, we’ll have figured it out. What a concept, to lament your next step. I didn’t sign up for a philosophical exercise, yet here I was, with The Lost Man, doing just that and enjoying it too.

I found myself hoping for fright on each corridor, though it wasn’t to be. Ultimately, the few slices of visual horror in this film when done, are done so well. At the same time, though, I can appreciate that director Kawamura did not rely on visual horror alone to create the uneasiness. He could have taken the easy route, but he didn’t. To satisfy horror fans, there were some much appreciated, but subtle, visual parallels between Exit 8 and Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). We turn a corner to find a lost little boy at the end of the corridor. He has ‘the shine’, to borrow from Kubrick; he has been through this before, and has to fight his corner to convince us of anomalies. Sometimes you just have to trust the kid. Around another corner we find a flood gushing toward us at a speed we can’t run from. Sometimes we find solace in our favourite tropes, particularly when we don’t expect them.

The concept of making one’s way down never-ending hallways really robs both our protagonist and the audience of any sense of autonomy. We are at the mercy of the rules. We cannot control what is to come, or why. The path to Exit 8 is a purgatory of sorts – a passage through to the next place that propels us towards some sort of reckoning that we haven’t anticipated or signed up for. No autonomy, no control, no idea how it’s going to end – or if we can even escape. Isn’t that what good horror does?

Exit 8 is slated for Irish general release on 24 April 2026.

Caileigh Ryan is a writer and critic living in Galway. Her fiction has appeared in Tír na nÓg literary magazine, and she appeared as a guest on the poetry podcast, Sharpen Your Tongue.

caileighryan.com

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CAILEIGH RYAN REVIEWS THE IRISH PREMIERE OF ANNIVERSARY AT THE DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2026.

The Irish premiere of Anniversary (2025) took place at the Dublin International Film Festival on a rainy Saturday morning at 10:30am. That’s too early for popcorn, and I hadn’t eaten breakfast, but this film certainly left me with plenty of food for thought. Writer and Director, Jan Komasa, speaking to the audience before the screening, said that he wrote this script in 2018 as a work of dystopian political fiction. “It was a dystopian film seven years ago!” he tells us, though it’s not a far cry from the political state of the world currently. The idea came, he says, when he was looking through annual family photographs, and how they changed over the years – different people sitting together year on year, a reflection of how we change over time.

Filmed in Dublin but set in Washington, DC, production was halted for a time by the SAG-AFTRA actors’ union strikes in 2023, however this gap in production plays in nicely to the transition of time over the five-year period in which the film takes place. Anniversary takes us inside the family life of the Taylors and follows the series of events that unfold after the 25th wedding anniversary party of parents Ellen (Diane Lane) and Paul (Kyle Chandler). Ellen, a liberal, politics professor, is stopped in her tracks when her writer son Josh (Dylan O’Brien) brings his new girlfriend to meet the family.

To Ellen’s horror, Josh’s new girlfriend, Liz Nettles, is an ex-student of Ellen’s, who wreaked havoc on Ellen’s professional career and expressed concerning far-right ideologies in a paper she wrote for the class, which Ellen found “disgusting.” As Ellen encourages Josh to seek publication for his ‘sci-fi trilogy’, he sends her reeling with a revelation. He has parked that dream. Liz is the dominant author in this relationship. Her debut novel is to be published soon, and when it is, The Change: The New Social Contract sells millions of copies, offering an alternative and right-wing way of living that takes the US by storm, so much so that the adapted American flag that adorns its cover starts popping up outside homes around the neighbourhood.

As the years progress, the Taylors’ lives descend into chaos – nobody sees eye-to-eye with Liz politically, despite her efforts to be liked and accepted into their clan. It is hard to believe that this lady, so pleasant, timid and elegant in appearance, is the driving force behind a “Frankenstein creation” that becomes an unprecedented best-seller and changes the country’s political climate with feverish intensity. What follows are various tensions that must be navigated, and we worry that the once close-knit family who respected each other’s diversity and respective careers, will be unable to overcome the new world they find themselves living in.

Anniversary addresses head-on the tragedy that unfolds when people are left without a choice, how difficult it is – impossible, almost – to really be a change-maker despite how passionately you feel about a cause. At its core, this film is about the all-too-familiar tragedy of what a country, the world, a life, can become when people are left without autonomy or choice, where it becomes entirely impossible to be both a change-maker, and to survive to see the outcome.

This ensemble really does a fantastic job of portraying a family that is real and complex and loves one another. These characters are normal people with their own individual, normal lives, who are challenged with navigating a new horizon. They cope by smoking weed down by the lake, making political jokes, and Ellen has a glass of wine permanently fixed in her hand during many scenes. Despite the heaviness of this story, there’s a welcome dose of comedic relief. A submissive husband in a prominent and confident family, Paul delivers some fantastic lines and had the audience laughing out loud. McKenna Grace is brilliant as Birdy, an optimistic and intelligent teen who sees the good in everyone. We could all do with a girl like her in our lives – an unapologetic beacon of hope for the future, a harbour of teenage optimism who believes the world can be good again.

Daryl McCormack delivers an extremely convincing performance as Rob Thompson, husband of second-oldest daughter, Cynthia, played by Zoey Deutch. Dylan O’Brien couldn’t have given us Josh any better. His character transition is frightening and believable – the Josh we encounter in the final half-hour is a far cry from the failed sci-fi author we met at the beginning. The male characters are constantly undermining, invalidating, and hindering the female ones. Each woman’s male counterpart is oblivious to the severity of this new way of living, until it becomes too late. Many moments reminded me of Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning dystopian novel, Prophet Song (Oneworld, 2023). When you truly think about it, how would you react if your life was upturned against your will?

The production standard of this film is outstanding, and you’d never guess it was filmed in Dublin unless you were familiar with some of the background settings. Even the grey skies, impossible to avoid in Ireland, played in visually to the tone of the film. It was also a real pleasure to listen to Komasa deliver a Q&A at the end of the screening, in which he offered further insight that only enhanced my appreciation of the film. He alluded to Liz and her ilk as a virus. They add and add and add to their toxic ideologies until their surroundings are at their mercy.

Watch the film in the morning if you can. It really woke me up that day.

Anniversary is now streaming on Netflix.

Caileigh Ryan is a writer and critic living in Galway. Her fiction has appeared in Tír na nÓg literary magazine, and she appeared as a guest on the poetry podcast, Sharpen Your Tongue.

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THOMAS POOL REPORTS ON THE OPENING NIGHT GALA OF THE DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL AND REVIEWS THE WORLD PREMIERE OF ‘ONCE UPON A TIME IN A CINEMA’.

As the bus lumbered up Dublin’s O’Connell Street, past the Carlton, on a rainy evening in February, an elderly woman sitting next to me turned to me and said, with great sadness, “That used to be a cinema. It was like a cathedral. Now look at it.” Today’s Carlton, a dog-eared casino, is no cathedral. O’Connell Street Upper is blighted, semi-derelict, and, quite literally, lifeless. According to some commentators, only one person still lives on O’Connell Street. What happens to a community that loses its third spaces – the places where people can gather outside of work or the home – is despairingly evident when one looks out the bus window at the Carlton casino.

On the evening of 19 February, however, the Light House Cinema, on Smithfield’s cobblestoned square, certainly felt like hallowed ground. Each year, the Dublin International Film Festival transforms the Light House into a site of pilgrimage for Ireland’s cinephiles. The festival opened with a gala and the world premiere of Limerick filmmaker David Gleeson’s Once Upon a Time in a Cinema.

The gala did not lack for glamour, but piously abstained from the cardinal sin of Dublin fashion: glitz. Lent had just started, after all. There were no flashy Met Gala-esque gowns on this red carpet, and most attendees embraced the effortless-chic aesthetic of the ‘Dublin Creative’. With Peroni and wine flowing freely, the buzzy crowd soon took their seats.

In less capable hands, Once Upon a Time in a Cinema could have been as sentimental and maudlin as its title would lead you to believe. However, under Gleeson’s direction, audiences were given a punchy, tight, classic-with-a-twist tale with a political undercurrent that nips like a static shock when you leave the theatre.

The son of a cinema owner in Limerick, Gleeson drew a lot from his own childhood experience in making this film, he told the crowd ahead of the screening. Cinema attendance peaked in Ireland in 1946, and to him, the current post-Covid anxieties of cinema proprietors are nothing new – first there were movies on the TV, then home video, then DVDs, then Netflix and the streaming wars, and on and on it goes. But, the cinema endures. Why?

The film opens in 1980s Limerick with Earl Clancy, played by Colin Morgan, discussing the impending sale of his cinema with his brother, Gerald, played by Calam Lynch. When Earl says he’ll miss the theatre like a hole in his head, we don’t believe him; and it’s clear that he doesn’t quite believe himself either. Earl and Gerald fill the classic roles of elder and younger brother. Earl, the eldest, is set in his ways, wears out-of-fashion wool suits, and is seemingly obsessed with Yazoo’s hit song, Only You. Gerald is forward thinking, has stylishly repurposed his father’s old jacket, and is ready for something new.

They plan to sell the cinema to a former associate of their late father, a shady politician and crooked businessman named Harry Conway, who is in town from Dublin that night, and is eager to close the sale. To prove that the cinema is in fine working order, and ready to be seamlessly handed over, the brothers Clancy invite Conway to the 8pm showing of Breathless (1983), starring Richard Gere. But with a break-in the night before, and nearly £100 missing from the register, the boys are on edge and eager to make sure the night goes off without a hitch. When Earl pops into the projection booth, to make sure the film is ready, he sees that Jack, the projectionist, is drunk on the job. The comedy of errors snowballs from there.

Earl spends the night in a sprint. Between pampering the greasy Conway, fending off a plumber he’s stiffed on his bill, chasing down rats, sleuthing for the thief, kicking out rowdy teens, confiscating weed, ignoring fines from the fire marshal, a leak, a convict out for revenge, and enduring the rolling blackouts of 1980s Ireland, all while trying to instil some fatherly wisdom and bond with his teenage daughter, Early Clancy is a portrait of a man on the ropes. But through it all, he is clearly at home. He can command an errant lightbulb with a look, can perfectly time the changing of the film reels, and walks through the town like he’s the mayor; everyone on the street knows his name and he knows theirs. He is as much a fixture of the community as his theatre is.

Despite it clearly being more home to him than his actual home, a point of contention between him and his daughter, Earl is still intent on selling the place. The brothers, while saddled with the theatre by their abusive late father, do in fact possess a keen sense for business. With a new bypass being constructed, they plan on opening a 24-hour petrol station, and watch with their feet up while the stress-free cash rolls in. Conway, however, is far shrewder than the brothers and has no intention of running a falling-down cinema.

Earl’s breaking point finally comes after a trio of revelations about Conway, his brother, and his daughter. Embittered by a sense of familial betrayal, the cinema truly does begin to feel like an anchor around Earl’s neck, and we believe him, at last, when he says he’s going to sell. Besieged, he takes shelter in the projectionist’s booth, and looking for relief, enjoys the joint he confiscated earlier. Sometimes all you need is drugs, recession-induced infrastructure failure, a brick through your window, and a crowd holding their lighters aloft in the darkness, serenading you with your favourite song, to make you realise what’s important in life. With community bonds reforged, and brother and daughter back at his side, Earl Clancy chooses the local road, not a bypass.

Stepping out onto Smithfield Square, the politics of the film only zap you then, when you look left towards The Cobblestone pub. While set in the 1980s, the film is a scathing indictment of contemporary Irish urban policy. In the cold night air, you realise that the Conways of Ireland, not the Clancys, are winning. With great rapaciousness, they have swallowed up our third spaces – our pubs, our restaurants, our nightclubs, our artist spaces, our cafés, and yes, even our cinemas. Where will we congregate when the last of our cultural cathedrals have been torn down, and the streets are filled with nothing but casinos, hotels, data centres, and tourist gift shops?

“No one ever fell in love at a petrol station”, Earl Clancy says at the close of the film. All love needs is somewhere it can grow, love can bloom in the darkest of places, even in the last row of a cinema.

The Dublin International Film Festival runs from 19 February to 1 March 2026. Tickets are available at diff.ie

Once Upon a Time in a Cinema is slated for general release on 1 May.

Thomas Pool is the Content and Production Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet and the Commissioning Editor of the miniVAN.

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THOMAS POOL DISCUSSES KELLY REICHARDT’S NEW FILM, THE MASTERMIND, PREMIERED IN IRELAND BY THE HUGH LANE GALLERY, IN CONJUNCTION WITH VOLTA PICTURES.

“Don’t try this at home”, Barbara Dawson, Director of the Hugh Lane Gallery, said as she launched the Irish premiere of a new art heist film, The Mastermind, at Dublin’s Light House Cinema on 14 October. The latest film from director Kelly Reichardt, The Mastermind centres on J.B. Mooney (played with hapless charm by Josh O’Connor) – an art school dropout, under-employed artisan carpenter, father of two young boys Tommy and Carl (played by Jasper and Sterling Thompson), and husband to Terri (played by, a frankly underutilised, Alana Haim). The Irish premiere was presented by the Hugh Lane Gallery in conjunction with Volta Pictures. This was the first event of the gallery’s new outreach programme, being delivered while it is closed for major renovations (including the building of a new city library) over the next three years.

For a heist film, The Mastermind is as surprisingly wry as it is political. The film opens, and mainly takes place in, the picturesquely suburban Framingham, Massachusetts. The first scene sees the family visiting the local art museum, the fictional Framingham Museum of Art. The kids prattle on in childish disinterest, while their mother, Terri, sits on a bench observing some unseen painting. With one blabbering child in tow, J.B. paces around the room, purveying the distinctly New England folk-art.

As the percussion-heavy, itchy jazz of Rob Mazurek’s score picks up, we realise he’s casing the joint. Noticing a sleeping security guard, lack of cameras, or any potential witnesses, J.B. seizes the opportunity to snatch a small wooden figurine from its display, storing it in his glasses case, and sneaking it out in his wife’s satchel. Here, we first get the sense of exactly who J.B. is, when he pauses to tie his shoelace in front of the security guard at the exit, while his wife and children leave the museum, unknowingly smuggling out the stolen figurine. Thus, the plot is hatched.

Set in 1970, we are instantly drawn into the time period by news reports of a foreign war spiralling beyond its original borders, the crackdown on student protestors by overzealous police, and the right-wing President’s denunciation of the anti-war movement. Sound familiar? The exceptional production design by Anthony Gasparro grounds us in the malaise of the 70s, along with the costuming and Reichardt’s earth-tone colour palette and expert use of pale winter sunlight.

Enlisting a few friends, J.B. convinces them the heist will go off without a hitch. Their plan is to steal four Arthur Dove paintings: Tree Forms (1932), Willow Tree (1937), Tanks & Snowbanks (1938), and Yellow Blue Green Brown (1941). They steal a car, swap the plates, set up another car to transfer the stolen art, and create a special box to store the precious loot. Nylon stockings are procured for masks, and Terri sews pillowcases into sacks to stuff the art into.

How much or how little Terri knows of her husband’s activities is not fully revealed. The breadwinner of the family, she seems frustrated by her husband’s lack of productivity, especially on the day of the heist, when J.B. attempts to drop the kids off at a closed school. She tersely tells him on the phone that it’s not an emergency and hangs up. This is the first stumbling block for our mastermind, as he sets his kids loose on the street with petty cash and tells them to meet him back in the parking lot later in the afternoon. He speeds away and picks up his pals, one of whom is armed, against J.B.’s wishes. The heist itself goes mostly according to plan, until a teenage girl practicing her French walks in on them. The heist and its consequences then continue to spiral out of control and threaten to unravel J.B. and his family.

Reichardt’s distinct cinematographic style allows for slow, contemplative shots, which if rendered into stills, would not look out of place in a photography museum. Hopper-esque scenes of cafés, streets, and rural towns, imbue the viewer with the dozy milieu of the American suburbs and countryside during the Vietnam era. One scene I found particularly visually eloquent depicts J.B. on a night bus, watching a sailor on leave playing with his infant child, as the baby’s mother looks on adoringly. When J.B. awakens in the disorienting morning light, the sailor is gone, and the baby and mother stare stoically ahead, not even glancing out of the window as the world passes them by.

The movie leaves much unsaid, and the cinematography is loaded with inferences: an abandoned passport, a Nixon poster, New England Americana, a TV sputtering out the sounds of helicopter rotors and machine gun fire, an FBI agent’s colourful, out of place shirt, the marvellously detailed cards on which J.B. had illustrated the paintings to show his co-conspirators – a brief but concise history of a man whose talents have been squandered.

The Mastermind follows a long line of art-heist films but differs from the genre by tackling the enigmatic core of what art means to us as individuals. Perhaps not since The Train (1964) – in which the French Resistance thwart the looting of France’s most cherished artworks by a Nazi general and art-lover on the eve of the liberation of Paris – has a genuine love of art been so clearly the motivation for the crime.

The idea of being a hunted man seems to be something that sits well with J.B. – low on cash and on the run across the country, he seeks shelter with old art school friends. Here, the politics of the era, disguised as mere set-dressing until now, are pushed to the forefront. Canada, a refuge for “draft dodgers, radical feminists, dope fiends… nice people”, as his friend tells him, is his only way out of an America that seems to be collapsing in on itself. The realities of state violence, political divisions, and the idea of fleeing one’s country become increasingly familiar to the politically disinterested J.B.

In the immediate aftermath of the heist, J.B., alone at home, carefully takes down a framed floral print, and places one of Dove’s stolen works on his living room wall. The camera pauses, as we see J.B. admire a painting that means so much more to him than we are allowed to know – a familiar, reverent feeling, to sit with something true to ourselves, which we won’t readily share with others. Reichardt’s love of art for what it elicits in us is also clear, both within the film and in her broader oeuvre, which has long featured forlorn creative types, and the many contradictions and complements of art. What art means and how we value it, differs from person to person throughout the film. J.B.’s unyielding father, a judge, remarks “It is inconceivable that those abstract paintings would be worth that much trouble,” while the local mob becomes curious about the stolen works, and makes J.B. acutely aware of their interest.

The Mastermind is unsentimental about the theft, unlike other art heist films, where the thieves are either downright villainous, or eventually won over by the populist battle cry à la Indiana Jones: “It belongs in a museum!” To steal art, to take it away from public view, evokes a sense of ancient injustice, like Zeus stealing back the flame, gifted to humans by Prometheus. So, we are relieved when J.B. picks up a discarded newspaper, stating that the work has been recovered; we sense that perhaps J.B. is relieved as well. On the lam, J.B. tells Terri over the phone that he did it for her and their kids, but sheepishly adds that he did it for himself, too. A nod, perhaps, to how the supposedly admirable man-commits-crime-for-family trope was forever dashed by Bryan Cranston in the series finale of Breaking Bad.

The nexus of art and money is complex, messy, and often unspoken. On the face of it, the rationale for J.B.’s bumbling heist is financial, while the motives of his co-conspirators don’t seem to go deeper than cold hard cash. The selfishness of J.B., and his wish to bring his life out of the mundane and into the exceptional, is the core of his motive. Ultimately, Reichardt cuts a middle path for J.B., who is neither an irredeemable fascist art looter, nor a master thief with a heart of gold; he’s an art school dropout, a common man who hates his commonness, desperate for a taste of the world he missed out on because of his own inaction, unable to enjoy the quiet fulfilment of family life. The film’s end, which so shockingly and unexpectedly fits his commonness, set off a ripple of dry laughter when the screen cut to black and the credits rolled.

The Mastermind opens in cinemas nationwide on Friday 24 October 2025.

Thomas Pool is the Content and Production Editor for the Visual Artists’ News Sheet and Commissioning Editor of the miniVAN.

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