THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (2022)

If you knew that Colin Farrell's great superpower is that he can make the best "sad puppy" face any actor has ever made, I can see why you might choose to make a film that gives him an extensive set of opportunities to do exactly that.

OK: actually he is very good in this, as is Gleeson, each doing their part to effectively dramatize McDonagh's idiosyncratic thematic questions (what do we owe to a relationship that's no longer serving us? is it better to be important or nice? what does God care about, really?). McDonagh returns the favor, gifting them each with trenchant one-liners that they deliver with evident relish. Barry Keoghan turns in great work in a fun supporting role, too.

I do wish that McDonagh trusted the material at the core of the story a little bit more: the attempts to juice it up by linking it allegorically to an ongoing civil war didn't do much for me, nor did the way that almost cartoonish shock violence gets used to escalate the stakes (we find this elsewhere in McDonagh's work on occasion, but it feels out-of-place here). And — I may be the outlier on this one, but: the deployment of the film's adorable animals struck me as sentimental, and I wish the film's turning points (and the screenplay's final lines) didn't rely on them so crucially. They struck me as secondary to the viral core of the story and their usage felt a little bit like McDonagh wasn't trusting the audience to stay interested without something cute to look at (or to put in danger).