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Our movie guy, James Finnegan, has a couple of good recommendations for you viewing pleasure on the box today…
Kelly’s Heroes (Saturday 3pm RTE1) is in a rather limited genre, that of comedy war film.
A rag bag collection of World War Two American soldiers decide to rob a bank holding significant deposits of gold bars, sixteen million dollars worth in fact, in a village deep inside German occupied France.
The tone of the film is more sixties and there is a fine cast of Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, Carroll O’Connor and Donald Sutherland, the latter in full hippie mode.
Eastwood’s experience on this film was so disappointing that from then on he would take more control on his future projects, producing most of his following films and directing many of them.
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Also, when you see the true reality of war every day on the news, it is not easy to watch a comedy version.
My granddaughters loves horses so their evening will be made with Spirit Untamed (Saturday 6.35pm RTE1).
Young Lucky Prescott moves to a sleepy little town from the city, where she befriends a wild mustang, the aforementioned Spirit, who shares her rebellious nature.
When a heartless wrangler plans to capture Spirit and his herd, Lucky and her new friends must rescue them, thereby embark on the adventure of a lifetime in this animated adventure starring the vocal talents of Jake Gyllenhall, Marsai Martin and Isabela Merced
A significant change in tone comes with The Delinquent Season (Saturday 9.40pm RTE1).
Academy Award Winner Cillian Murphy, Andrew Scott, Catherine Walker and Eva Birthistle are all terrific in this tense drama set in suburban Dublin.
Two couples appear to be living in seemingly perfect marriages, until cracks start to appear in them, as each individual is fighting a different battle that no one else can see.
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Taxi Driver (Saturday 10pm TG4) is, frankly, the must see film of the weekend, in this Martin Scorsese’s iconic and hugely influential classic drama.
Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) observers the squalid side of life on the New York streets from his taxi, but he sees potential redemption when he notices teenage prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster.
His chronic insomnia fuels his paranoia and he becomes increasingly disturbed and ultimately driven to a brutal act of violence.
Noted for the iconic improvisation scene when De Niro imagines a confrontation in a mirror, but Scorsese really excels at showing Bickle as crazy, yet with an almost understandable reason from his warped perspective.
Rialto (Saturday 11.45pm RTE1) stars Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Colm, a forty something husband and father of two, grieving the death of his father
His life takes a further downward hit when he is made redundant from his managerial job at the docks.
When Colm experiences his first homosexual experience with a young sex worker, his family life comes under increasing strain.
A difficult story but handled sensitively by Director Peter Mackie Burns and Writer Mark O’Halloran as well as the central performance of Tom Vaughan-Lawlor. Enjoy!
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