Another Year (2010)

Another year and it's another Mike Leigh film. Just when I think the man canot surprise me anymore, he comes up with another wonderful gem. Decidedly less saccharine-filled than Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), Another Year boasts a troupe of Leigh regulars, who play regular folk, talking regular-folk stuff, doing what regular folks do. Sounds boring, right? In someone else's hands, this would have turned out to be a exactly that, but in Leigh's hands it feels wonderful and just staged enough to get over its presumed similarity to real life.

Perrier's Bounty (2009)

Perrier's Bounty is not the Irish Snatch (somebody, somewhere must have made this porno), but somehow I wish it was. What starts off as an off-beat, super-fast paced pseudo-gangster flick turns into a bloated, unfunny mess that makes absolutely no sense.


Cillian Murphy (one of our favourite actors here at Cinewise) plays Michael McCrea. He owes money to the local mob boss Darren Perrier (Brendan Gleeson, who gives his usual best) and unless he pays by midnight, two of his goons will break his bones. Desperate, he asks a loan-shark to help him out and gets involved in a break-in, which ends up a blackmail operation that will earn him more money than he owes. So far so good. However, when he misses the deadline at midnight the two goons show up at his door to break his bones. Michael's neighbour - freshly dumped by boyfriend, literally girl-next-door - kills one of them in the hallway. Now Michael not only owes money to Perrier, but he is also involved in the death of one of his men. With the help of his voluntary-insomniac father ('the Reaper' told him that next time he falls asleep he will die - cue Jim Broadbent munching on Nescafe straight from the jar) they bury the body up on a hill overlooking Dublin. In order to avenge his fallen man, Perrier puts a bounty on Michael's head, unbeknownst to the trio.