Jenny McCartney, Author at Catholic Herald

Jenny McCartney

October 27, 2016

The first time I attended a service in a Catholic church I was 19 years old, and it was the funeral of our friend, the artist Kieran McGoran. He always used to call in on us over Christmas – you couldn’t quite predict when – but that year he had taken ill and died on

Jenny McCartney: I feel sorry for girls today

October 13, 2016

The journalist Nick Cohen – in an article lamenting the fact that organisers of literary festivals expect writers to give their time free of charge – once pondered on the fact that “exposure” was offered in place of money. This was a strange word to use as bait, he thought, “when people die of exposure”.

Film: The cop caper where everyone’s a smart aleck

October 06, 2016

War on Everyone (Cert PG, 100 mins,★★) takes the writer/director John Michael McDonagh’s dark, antic spirit – in Ireland for his last two films – and transports it to Albuquerque, where a pair of corrupt, foul-mouthed cops are receiving a final warning from their exasperated police chief. Bob Bolaño (Michael Peña) and Terry Monroe (Alexander

Film: Two actors trapped inside a dictator’s fantasy

September 22, 2016

The Lovers and the Despot Cert PG, 100 mins, ★★★★ The extraordinary, true tale that unravels in The Lovers and the Despot, a documentary from Robert Cannan and Ross Adam, might at first be dismissed as too incredible even for a thriller. It begins, conventionally enough, with a love story between the glamorous actress Choi

Film: The blind man who taught himself to see anew

June 30, 2016

Notes on Blindness (U, 90 mins) ★★★★ In 1983, the British theologian John Hull finally went completely blind. By the time the last flicker of light died he had already developed survival strategies. In 1980, when his sight first began to fail, he had asked: “How do blind people read big books?” and received the

Film: A graphic Roman tale of sin and its consequences

June 23, 2016

Suburra (★★★★, cert 18, 135 mins), an Italian neo-noir film set in Rome in 2011, should come with a health warning: not for the squeamish or faint-hearted. It graphically displays the expansive underbelly of civic and political corruption, from Mafia murders to drug-fuelled orgies involving politicians and prostitutes. One could not, however, accuse it of

Film: Ibsen’s wild duck flaps its way onto the screen

May 26, 2016

Simon Stone’s The Daughter (15, 95 mins, ★★★) takes Ibsen’s heart-wrenching play The Wild Duck and transports it, still flapping, to contemporary rural Australia. There, the paterfamilias Henry (Geoffrey Rush) is in the melancholy act of closing down the family timber mill which employs numerous locals. He is also preparing to marry his much younger

Film: Terrence Malick – from transcendence to cliché

May 05, 2016

Terrence Malick’s films are known as much for their philosophical ambition as their painterly style. When the two work well together, as in The Tree of Life (2011), the combination can hint at transcendence. When they don’t, you end up with something like Knight of Cups (★★, 15, 118 mins), Malick’s tale of a troubled,

Film: Terrence Malick – from transcendence to cliché

May 05, 2016

Watching his latest film, Knight of Cups, is like being cornered in a bar by a handsome bore

Film: Seven compelling tales of capitalism gone wrong

April 21, 2016

Katharine Round’s documentary The Divide (Cert 12A, 78 mins, ★★★) is based on the influential 2009 book The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in which the authors argue that the gulf between rich and poor in Britain and America – currently at its highest since 1928 – has surprisingly pernicious effects upon

Film: A Passion drama that lacks a sense of mystery

March 17, 2016

Risen (12A, 107 mins, ★★★), set in 33AD, tells the story of Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection from an unusual perspective: that of an ambitious, battle-hardened Roman tribune, Clavius (Joseph Fiennes), who has built his career on bloodshed in the service of the Roman Empire. The prefect of Judea, a silkily uneasy Pontius Pilate (Peter Firth),

A Passion drama that lacks a sense of mystery

March 17, 2016

Risen offers a fresh look at an era studded with casual cruelties and beset by intrigue

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