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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Rippy review – kangaroo slasher bounces into Cocaine Bear territory

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Horror drama about a marsupial in the frame for murder brings earnestness and maudlin backstory where none is needed

It is a horror movie truth universally acknowledged that if your killer bounces after its victims, you’d best play it for laughs. But that is something mystifyingly lost on Ryan Coonan’s slasher flick, which appears to have transformed the hench kangaroo meme into a feature-length film. Sadly, Rippy is no antipodean Cocaine Bear; after traversing wastes of maudlin backstory, it waits until the final five minutes before finally delivering some tongue-in-cheek sauce courtesy of a famous marsupial catchphrase.

Outback sheriff Maddie (Tess Haubrich) lives in the shadow of her late, toast-of-the-town cop father, who was also a high-school sports champion and war hero. (She saves us having to work this out by telling us off the bat in voiceover.) When his wild-eyed buddy Schmitty (Michael Biehn) wanders in babbling about a humongous homicidal joey, and two drunks wind up chop-sueyed in the brush, it seems like a case of murders in the ’roo morgue. But, convinced by Schmitty’s ex (Angie Milliken) not to trust his ravings, Maddie homes in on a more rational suspect: an ex-con at the local mine (a brief cameo from Mad Max’s Nathan Jones).

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