Gabriel Byrne

Miller’s Crossing

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Leo and Tom face to face

By the time the Coen brothers made Miller’s Crossing, their third movie, it had become obvious that their films weren’t really set in the real world. Like Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing is set in an adjacent reality constructed entirely from moviescapes and populated with characters we seem to have met before. That it works brilliantly, both as pastiche and as a drama in its own right, is the difference between the Coens and some others who try the same thing. That it also manages to be funny when it should be and tense as hell when necessary, marks them out as something really special. The film is built around askew … Read more

Lamborghini: the Man behind the Legend

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Frank Grillo as Ferruccio Lamborghini

Frank Grillo is the best thing about Lamborghini: the Man behind the Legend, putting force and subtlety into his portrayal of Ferruccio Lamborghini, the farmer’s son who wanted to make tractors, later the tractor manufacturer who became a producer of high-end sports cars. Choose your metaphor – a vehicle that never quite gets going, a gear change fumbled, an engine running on the wrong fuel – this a strange film relying on prior knowledge, and lots of it, to fill in the gaps. Back from the Second World War, young Ferruccio (played here by Romano Reggiani) disappoints his farmer father by proclaiming that he’ll not be taking on the farm when his time … Read more

The Usual Suspects

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Pete Postlethwaite, Stephen Baldwin and Gabriel Byrne in The Usual Suspects

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 January Pete Postlethwaite dies, 2011 On this day in 2011, aged 64, the actor Pete Postlethwaite died of pancreatic cancer. It had been diagnosed in March 2009. Postlethwaite had already survived cancer once, having been diagnosed of testicular cancer in 1990, which went into remission after he had a testicle removed. An actor simultaneously of great force and nuance, Postlethwaite’s relatively uncommon name marks his family down as having originated in Postlethwaite in Cumbria, England (the name means Postle’s Farm). His relatively uncommon looks – huge bony cheekbones, honest putty nose, angry skin – were matched by his trajectory into … Read more

Wah-Wah

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Emily Watson and Gabriel Byrne in Wah-Wah

Richard E Grant’s autobiographical book With Nails (a reference to his film debut in Withnail and I) having been something of a hit, it was probably only a matter of time before he tried his hand at directing. He’s once again in loosely autobiographical territory in this drama set in Swaziland during the late 1960s Indian summer of British colonialism. Grant dissects his cuckoo class through a “personal is political” story – the breakdown of the marriage of his own parents (played by Gabriel Byrne, Miranda Richardson) and the arrival of a new mum (Emily Watson), an American with a clearer, brasher view of matters, a woman who says what she thinks (the … Read more