Declan Burke

Ireland

Journalist, Writer and Editor at Freelance

Author, editor and journalist, although rarely in that order. Novel: The Lammisters (@NoAlibisPress) “The funniest book of the year." ~ Sunday Independent

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Articles

Film review: Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs are remarkable in The Salt Path

1 week ago | irishexaminer.com | Declan Burke

★★★★★ Sometimes the only way home is to simply walk out your front door. (12A) opens with English couple Ray (Gillian Anderson) and Moth Winn (Jason Isaacs) being evicted from their farm, virtually penniless and with nowhere to go.
Film review: The Final Reckoning is trumpeted as the final Mission: Impossible movie

2 weeks ago | irishexaminer.com | Declan Burke

★★★★☆ (12A) opens in a decidedly gloomy fashion, however: not only is humanity suffering from innumerable wars and widespread famine, it’s also facing the existential threat of a ‘truth-eating parasite AI’, aka ‘the Entity’, that is on the brink of colonising the world’s cyber-structure and unleashing a nuclear holocaust.
Film review: Hallow Road is a bravura slice of dialogue-driven cinema

3 weeks ago | irishexaminer.com | Declan Burke

★★★★☆Every parent will do whatever it takes to prevent their child from making life-changing mistakes, but Hallow Road (15A) begins with a disaster already in train. When her daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell) rings at two a.m. to tell Maddie (Rosamund Pike) that she has knocked down a young woman on Hallow Road in the remote Ashfolk Forest, Maddie – a paramedic – immediately jumps in the car with Alice’s dad Frank (Matthew Rhys), keeping Alice on the phone so she can administer CPR by proxy.
Film review: Nicolas Cage is brilliantly cast in The Surfer

4 weeks ago | irishexaminer.com | Declan Burke

★★★★☆ A sport, a way of life, a philosophy for living: surfing lends itself to extravagant myth-making, which (15A) is happy to lean into as the movie opens, with our eponymous hero (played by Nicolas Cage) informing his estranged son (Finn Little) that life’s crucial moments are a lot like encountering a massive wave: ‘You either surf it,’ he says, ‘or you get wiped out.’ But when the Surfer returns home to surf the remote beach at Luna Bay, he discovers that the shore has been colonised by...
Film review: Sinners is one of the most entertaining movies of the year

1 month ago | irishexaminer.com | Declan Burke

Good and evil are flip sides of the same coin, at least according to (16s), which opens in Mississippi in 1932 with brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B Jordan) returning to their old stomping ground after learning the gangster trade in Al Capone’s Chicago. Smoke and Stack plan to use their ill-gotten gains to open a juke joint in the town’s old sawmill, a scheme the local white folk, and particularly the resident Klansmen, don’t look too kindly upon.
Film review: Darragh Humphreys is terrific fun in Fran the Man

1 month ago | irishexaminer.com | Declan Burke

‚ėÖ‚ėÖ‚ėÖ‚ėÜ‚ėÜFootball is a team game, but one man ‚ÄĒ Pele, Maradona, Fran Costello ‚ÄĒ can be the difference between a good side and a team of immortals. (12A) stars Darragh Humphreys as Fran, assistant manager of St Peter‚Äôs Celtic in the footballing heartland of Sallynoggin, a humble slogger who suddenly goes viral when he calls national treasure Brian Kerr a ‚Äėsnakey geebag‚Äô live on air during the televised draw for the FAI Cup.
Film of the week: The End can get exhausting, but it’s also oddly gripping

2 months ago | irishexaminer.com | Declan Burke

★★★☆☆Post-apocalyptic movies come in all shapes and sizes, but (12A), which was largely filmed in Ireland, pretty much defies categorisation. Living half a mile down an abandoned salt mine, a wealthy family — Father (Michael Shannon), Mother (Tilda Swinton), and Son (George MacKay) — are determined to maintain the patrician values of their formerly dominant class, even if the world they once knew has been blown to hell.
New crime fiction: Five compelling reads

2 months ago | irishtimes.com | Declan Burke

The sleuth with the outsider’s eye is a convention as old as the crime genre itself, but Jess Kidd gives it an interesting twist in her latest novel, Murder at Gulls Nest (Faber, £16.99).
Film reviews: Robert De Niro is good value in genteel mobster movie The Alto Knights

2 months ago | irishexaminer.com | Declan Burke

★★★★☆Aging mobsters ‘stomping around like extinct dinosaurs’ take centre-stage in (15A), which opens in 1957 with the ‘Boss of Bosses’, Frank Costello (Robert De Niro), surviving a murder attempt orchestrated by Vito Genovese (also played by De Niro).
Snow White review: Rachel Zegler a persuasive princess but Gal Gadot falls flat as Evil Queen

2 months ago | irishexaminer.com | Declan Burke

★★★☆☆Named for the blizzard in which she was born, the young princess Snow White (G) — played by Rachel Zegler — grows up beloved by her royal parents.