Category Archives: Irish Film

SKINTOWN wins big

SKINTOWN wins big

Irish Film

SKINTOWN wins big

Kieron J. Walsh’s SKINTOWN has taken home the £50,000 Sean Connery Prize for feature filmmaking excellence at the 2026 Edinburgh International Film Festival, beating out nine other feature-length world premieres in a field the festival’s own leadership called exceptionally strong. Voted on by audiences across the festival’s run, the prize crowns a story rooted firmly in Northern Irish soil: two best friends scheming to break free of small-town life against the backdrop of the 1994 ceasefire. Jack Rowan and Chris Walley lead the film, adapted from Ciaran McMenamin’s novel by McMenamin himself, who also penned the screenplay. Visit Films is handling international sales, so expect this one to travel.

The short film prize told its own story of raw emotional stakes. Sindha Agha’s GRIEF ROOM won the £15,000 Thelma Schoonmaker Prize for short filmmaking excellence, a tightly wound drama about two estranged sisters forced back into each other’s orbit at their mother’s deathbed.

Both awards were handed out at a ceremony at Edinburgh’s Cameo Cinema, presented by Jason Connery on behalf of The Connery Foundation, capping off a festival that ran August 13 to 19. EIFF CEO and festival director Paul Ridd reflected on the strength of this year’s lineup, saying the standard of films and filmmakers competing had been exceedingly high, and that the festival was proud to launch such terrific work into the world. He wished the filmmakers well as they carry their films, and their careers, forward, calling it a pleasure to have spent the past week among such talented people.

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Ronan eyes Bond role

Ronan eyes Bond role

Irish Film

Ronan eyes Bond role

Saoirse Ronan has revealed the role she’d love to take on next, and it could bring her onto the same screen as her husband, Jack Lowden. The Irish actress, 32, has confessed that her real ambition is to play a Bond villain, and she’s not joking about it. Speaking to Empire, she said she wants her career to go darker, admitting, “I want to go dark. I said that I wanted to be a Bond villain and I’m dead serious.” She elaborated on why the idea appeals to her so much, pointing out how rare and dramatically rich a young female villain could be. As she put it, there’s something compelling about watching a woman channel pent-up anger and direct it somewhere, especially for the girls and women watching. It’s a kind of role she says she’d love to explore further.

The timing of her comments is what makes them so intriguing. Earlier this month, reports surfaced that Lowden was being strongly considered for the next James Bond, fueling speculation that the couple, who welcomed their first child in late 2025, could end up sharing the screen in the franchise. If that happens, they’d become only the second real-life couple to appear opposite each other in a Bond film, following Grace Jones and Dolph Lundgren, who starred together in 1985’s A VIEW TO A KILL. Whether Ronan’s dream villain role and Lowden’s rumoured casting actually align remains to be seen, but the idea alone has given Bond fans plenty to speculate about. The next installment, the 26th in the franchise, is still untitled and will be directed by Denis Villeneuve, best known for DUNE.

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Irish Film

THE INCOMER review

THE INCOMER review

Irish Film

THE INCOMER review

Domhnall Gleeson continues an impressive run of form with THE INCOMER, a deft comedy with appeal for anyone who enjoyed the bucolic absurdities of FATHER TED or the Schrute farm from the US version of THE OFFICE.

Gleeson plays pencil-pushing bureaucrat Daniel, arriving meekly by boat to a supposedly uninhabited Scottish island to remove two unruly inhabitants, the robust sibling pair of Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O’Rourke), who have lived away from the mainlanders for decades, keenly practicing their vigorous defence techniques in readiness for an unwelcome incursion. It’s a role that showcases Gleeson’s particular gift for gentle, put-upon decency, and writer/director Louis Paxton’s film gives him room to develop Daniel from a meek functionary into someone genuinely grappling with loneliness and isolation.

As the invading mainland force become shared enemies to the trio, survivalist Callum (Emun Elliott) offers a stark contrast to Daniel’s gentle willingness to understand, while John Hannah is almost unrecognisable in his bizarre role as an aquatic sea-creature. Gleeson anchors the film’s brisk comic satire of Scottish bureaucracy and inward-looking identity with real warmth, marking THE INCOMER as another confident addition to a filmography that continues to widen in range and ambition.

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Irish Film

Farrell narrates F1’s FIVE LIGHTS

Farrell narrates F1's FIVE LIGHTS

Irish Film

Farrell narrates F1's FIVE LIGHTS

Formula 1 has tapped Colin Farrell for its biggest marketing moment of the season, and for the actor it’s clearly a labour of love. Ahead of the 2026 season restart at Zandvoort on August 21, Formula 1 has launched FIVE LIGHTS, a new global marketing campaign featuring all 22 F1 drivers and narration from Farrell, described as a longtime racing fan. The 90-second film debuted on 16 August and builds around one of the sport’s most tension-soaked rituals.

As each of the five lights illuminates, the audience is drawn deeper into the driver’s mindset, capturing the focus, anticipation and composure required to compete at the limit of human and technical performance. Farrell provides the narration, while UNKLE’s Reign, featuring Ian Brown, serves as the soundtrack. His delivery leans measured and controlled, contrasting deliberately with the intensity of the race footage, underlining the psychological pressure facing drivers before a start, describing the need for stillness amid the noise and chaos of a grid. It’s a role that suits Farrell well given how often his affection for motorsport has surfaced publicly, and F1 clearly leaned into that authenticity rather than simply hiring a recognisable voice.

The campaign runs from 16 August to 13 September across social and digital platforms, and the ambition stretches well beyond a phone screen. It will also feature across six high-profile advertising locations across the United Kingdom and the United States, taking over displays at Piccadilly Circus and The Outernet in London. Stateside, it will be seen in Times Square, New York, at Caesars Palace on the Las Vegas Strip and on Sunset Boulevard, and at The Moxy in Los Angeles. The campaign was developed and produced by creative branded content agency WING, in close collaboration with Formula 1.

The timing is deliberate. The campaign launches at the halfway point of another record-breaking year for Formula 1, with the sport now boasting more than 830 million fans worldwide, while the 2026 season has delivered 11 consecutive sell-out Grands Prix and six new circuit attendance records. F1 chief commercial officer Emily Prazer framed the thinking behind it simply, noting that the pre-race countdown brings anticipation, excitement and pressure together in one of the sport’s most powerful moments, and that the second half of the season called for something reflecting the emotional connection fans feel with teams and drivers every race weekend. For Farrell, it’s another example of his interests outside acting finding their way into high-profile work, and a reminder that his enthusiasm for speed and competition is no passing fascination.

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Balfe set for TANGLED

Balfe set for TANGLED

Irish Film

Balfe set for TANGLED

Caitríona Balfe has joined Disney’s live-action TANGLED as Queen Arianna, Rapunzel’s long-lost mother, as the studio continues to expand the cast of its upcoming adaptation. The OUTLANDER star, a five-time Golden Globe nominee, was announced for the role alongside Elliot Cowan, who will play King Frederic, and Patrick and Hugo McPherson, who will portray the Stabbington twins.

Balfe was not featured in the footage Disney presented at D23 on Friday, but the studio confirmed her casting as part of its latest wave of announcements surrounding the film. The new cast members join Teagan Croft as Rapunzel, Milo Manheim as Flynn Rider and Kathryn Hahn as Mother Gothel, with Diego Luna, known for ANDOR, also set to appear as a new character named Hawthorne. Michael Gracey is directing the live-action TANGLED from a screenplay by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and Michael Montemayor, with Disney confirming the film will arrive in cinemas on March 31, 2028.

The original TANGLED, released in 2010, follows Rapunzel, a young woman with magical long hair who has spent her life confined to a tower, and whose world changes when Flynn Rider, a runaway thief, arrives and becomes entangled in her journey to discover the world beyond it and learn the truth of her identity.

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Irish Film

McDonagh returns with WILD HORSE NINE

WILD HORSE NINE trailer

Irish Film

WILD HORSE NINE trailer

Martin McDonagh has never made it a secret that Ireland runs through everything he does, and the arrival of the trailer for WILD HORSE NINE, his first feature since the towering achievement of THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN, is another reminder of just how singular his voice remains in contemporary cinema.

Though London-born, McDonagh is the son of Galway and Sligo parents, and that dual identity has shaped a career that swings between the bleak, blackly comic heart of the west of Ireland and the wider, equally morally tangled world beyond it. He cut his teeth as a playwright with THE LEENANE TRILOGY and THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN, plays steeped in Connemara’s particular brand of savage wit and quiet devastation, before crossing into film with the Oscar-winning short SIX SHOOTER and then IN BRUGES, the 2008 debut that announced him as one of the most distinctive filmmakers of his generation. Along the way he has returned again and again to Irish soil and Irish collaborators, most unforgettably in THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN, which reunited him with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson on the fictional island of Inisherin and earned nine Oscar nominations, cementing what many consider his finest work to date.

WILD HORSE NINE takes him somewhere entirely new, trading the Irish countryside for Easter Island and the tense days before the 1973 Chilean coup, but the fingerprints are unmistakably his. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell star as CIA agents Chris and Lee, dispatched from Santiago by their bureau chief MJ, played by Steve Buscemi, and as the two men wrestle with buried pasts and present conspiracies amid the island’s towering Moai statues, Chris strikes up a bond with a pair of rebellious students played by Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas that threatens to upend everything. Tom Waits and Parker Posey round out a cast that already has the makings of another McDonagh ensemble to remember, and Searchlight Pictures, once again partnering with Blueprint Pictures and Film4 as they did on BANSHEES, clearly believes they have something special on their hands ahead of the November 6th release.

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Irish Film

Murphy saves historic Kerry theatre

Murphy saves historic Cork theatre

Irish Film

Murphy saves historic Cork theatre

OPPENHEIMER star Cillian Murphy and Yvonne McGuinness have expressed their delight after securing approval for their ambitious plans to revive Dingle’s Phoenix Cinema as a multi-disciplinary arts space. The artist and her Oscar-winning actor husband purchased the historic Kerry cinema in late 2024 and unveiled a redevelopment vision that retains the building’s cinematic function while dramatically expanding its creative footprint, adding a performance space, exhibition and rehearsal areas, artist studios, a bar, café, restaurant, and a redesigned courtyard.

The path to approval was not straightforward. Kerry County Council initially granted planning permission, but the project’s fate was pushed into the hands of An Coimisiún Pleanála earlier this year after several third-party appeals from local residents. That hurdle has now been cleared, paving the way for the cinema’s transformation.

Murphy and McGuinness share deep roots in the west Kerry Gaeltacht. The Cork-born actor’s family holidayed in the area for decades during his childhood, and he continues to spend extended periods there with his own family today. McGuinness has framed the project as an effort to reopen the venue’s doors and broaden its creative potential, restoring the Phoenix to its historic place at the heart of Dingle’s cultural life.

The cinema’s story is one of resilience. Destroyed by fire in both 1921 and 1938, it was rebuilt on each occasion by the Houlihan family, whose determination gave the venue its fitting name. For more than a century before its closure during the covid pandemic, the Phoenix served as a vital social and cultural hub for the west Kerry community, hosting drama productions, concerts, and dances, and later welcoming showbands and performers including Rory Gallagher and Dana. Murphy himself has a personal connection to the venue beyond ownership, having visited in 2010 for a screening of his film PERRIER’S BOUNTY.

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Irish Film

Bea set for STARMAN

Aisling Bea set for STARMAN

Irish Film

Aisling Bea set for STARMAN

Aisling Bea is heading to Mars — well, at least in fiction. The Irish actress and BAFTA TV winner has joined the cast of STARMAN, The Hollywood Reporter has exclusively revealed, marking another high-profile addition to an already stacked ensemble. Bea joins Oscar winner Brendan Fraser, known for THE WHALE and THE MUMMY, and two-time Emmy winner Jeff Daniels, familiar to audiences from DUMB AND DUMBER and THE NEWSROOM, in the cosmic sci-fi thriller currently filming in Australia. Emmy winner Josh Wakely, who created BEAT BUGS, is directing from his own original screenplay, giving the project a singular creative vision from page to screen.

STARMAN follows Tom Adams, played by Fraser, an architect of the future who leads a historic expedition to Mars and finds himself at the forefront of humanity’s next great frontier. When unforeseen events leave him stranded millions of miles from Earth, his mission transforms into a desperate race against time, fuelled equally by survival instinct and love. Bea steps into the role of Julia Hanley, a defiant and magnetic Irish photographer who looks past Tom’s world-changing ambition to find the man underneath, ultimately redefining his life through love. It’s a role that should give Bea real emotional range to work with, a shift from the comedic sharpness audiences know her for and a chance to anchor the human heart of a big-swing space epic. With Fraser and Daniels already bringing serious pedigree to the production, Bea’s casting only raises the intrigue around what Wakely is building with STARMAN, and Irish audiences will have plenty of reason to watch this one closely as it takes shape in Australia.

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Irish Film