Cal review – grieving Helen Mirren superb in compassionate Troubles romance

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Mirren won best actress at Cannes in 1984 for her role as Marcella, who forms a relationship with John Lynch’s Cal – a man complicit in her husband’s murder Pat O’Connor’s Northern Irish movie from 1984, adapted by author Bernard MacLaverty from his own novel, holds up very well for its rerelease; better in fact than most of the movies and TV drama made about and during the Troubles. It has an unhurried, thoughtful and very human quality; Helen Mirren won the best actress award at Cannes for her performance here and in fact it is very well acted across the board by a blue-chip cast. Mirren plays Marcella, a woman from a Catholic background, married across the sectarian divide to a reserve police officer murdered at his parents’ farmhouse by an IRA man who had bullied a bewildered local guy into being his getaway driver; this is Cal, played by the gauntly intense John Lynch. Cal lives with his widowed father; a gentle performance by Donal McCann, who was Gabriel Conroy in John Huston’...
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Mark Kermode on… Martin Scorsese’s love of British cinema

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The director’s new BFI season championing hidden gems of British film, hot on the heels of his Powell and Pressburger documentary, reveals some of the inspirations of a film-making great and passionate fan

This weekend, the BFI Southbank in London begins a season of films entitled Martin Scorsese Selects Hidden Gems of British Cinema. Among the treats that caught my eye are a terrific Terence Fisher double bill (1948’s To the Public Danger and 1952’s Stolen Face), Roy Ward Baker’s Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (1973) and a rare nitrate-print screening of Alberto Cavalcanti’s dark 1942 gem, Went the Day Well?

The fact that a director whose own extraordinary CV includes Taxi Driver (1973), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and, just last year, Killers of the Flower Moon should curate such a season may seem remarkable. But Scorsese has always been a film fan as much as a film-maker, and the movies he has championed over the years are every bit as important to him as those he has made.

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