Neil Jordan

At some point in my lifetime, Irish teenager Saoirse Ronan will be renowned as the best actress on the planet. It’s only a question of how long she’ll have to appear in movies like Neil Jordan’s Byzantium before it happens. The star of Atonement and Hanna just has an uncanny gift for what is needed in a scene, and how much of it she ought to deliver. Ronan is the brightest spot by far in Byzantium, opening this week at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, which isn’t a failure but has little to recommend it beyond her incredible performance.

Byzantium Written by Moira Buffini Directed by Neil Jordan UK/USA/Ireland, 2012 Two female vampires holed up in a seaside town hotel; for certain savvy viewers, this distilled description of Byzantium’s premise may bring to mind Harry Kümel’s strange and sensual film Daughters of Darkness from 1971. Neil Jordan’s return to both horror and the bloodsucking …

Running from February 14th to the 24th, the 2013 installment of the increasingly popular Glasgow Film Festival marks its ninth incarnation. Advertised as a festival “for the people”, GFF tends to stray from the red carpet approach and curation-heavy feel of its local(-ish) cousin, June’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, though it does have various themed …

It is by complete surprise that I ended up with a copy of this movie. There I was, walking the aisles of my virtual movie store, looking for ‘The Empire of the Wolves’ when my clumsy fingers stumbled and clicked on Neil Jordan’s (The Crying Game, In Dreams, Breakfast on Pluto) film instead. The result? …