Mike McCahill, Author at Catholic Herald

Mike McCahill

Film: Women going wild – and everyone’s invited

August 03, 2017

Few would have had many hopes for Girls Trip (★★★, cert 15, 122 mins), a raucous saga of four black American pals cutting loose over one New Orleans weekend. Yet it’s become the wildcard in the summer movie season, having accrued double its $19m budget just 10 days after its US release. In part, this

Film: Is this the weirdest God movie ever made?

June 08, 2017

The initial wave of faith-based movies – those medium-to-low budget dramas boosted by Evangelical word of mouth – diminished quickly in the wake of 2014’s expert-defying God’s Not Dead (budget: £1.5m, take: £45m). The studios swiftly entered the temple, and while that same year’s Heaven is for Real boasted a modicum of cinematic nous, few

Film: Redgrave’s secret scripture has little to reveal

May 18, 2017

Jim Sheridan’s handsome yet flimsy melodrama The Secret Scripture (★★, cert 12A, 109 mins) turns out to be a tale of two actresses, one great, one getting there, neither quite given the script they deserve. We’re greeted by no less a figure than Vanessa Redgrave, lasting out her days in a decommissioned asylum in Sligo

Film: National treasures keep calm and carry on

April 20, 2017

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. The spectre of the “well-made British film” – well-cast, well-acted and well-dressed, yet so emotionally hemmed in as to pack all the wallop of a damp handkerchief – hangs heavy over Their Finest (★★★, cert 12A, 115 mins). Directed by Lone Scherfig, it takes its inspiration from Lissa

Film: The Lost City of Z

March 30, 2017

The true-life figure driving the transporting The Lost City of Z (15, 141 mins, ★★★★★) is Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), a jobbing British Army serviceman of lowly descent who, while mapping the Bolivia-Peru border in 1906, became distracted by rumours of a mysterious city of gold – the same talk, we note, that lured Conquistadors

Film: Critics, relax. This enfant terrible hasn’t sold out

February 23, 2017

Even an enfant terrible must grow up sooner or later. Prodigal French-Canadian Xavier Dolan’s trouble is that he’s done so along the Cannes Croisette – where he screened his debut (2009’s I Killed My Mother) aged just 20, then won acclaim for increasingly ambitious works (trans drama Laurence Anyways, Hitchcockian thriller Tom at the Farm),

Film: A wildly eccentric biopic succumbs to convention

January 19, 2017

Jackie (15, 100 mins, ★★★) How does one secure a legacy? The question has assumed renewed prominence in recent months, with a British prime minister resigning after severely misjudging the public mood, and a Democrat president ceding the White House to a successor representing who-knows-what. The Chilean film-maker Pablo Larraín’s English-language debut, Jackie, approaches the matter from

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