Weekend films

'Little Things Like This', a busy drama with an intense Cillian Murphy

New releases include Tim Mielants' Irish feature, chosen as the opening film of this year's Berlinale

29 November 2024

3' min read

Parent-child relationships are the focus of the weekend in theatres: this is indeed the main theme of two of the week's most anticipated titles, 'Little Things Like This' and 'Hey Joe'.

The first stars Cillian Murphy as Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and loving father of five daughters, who lives with his family in an Irish village. During the Christmas season of 1985, however, the man discovers some secrets concerning the convent in his town that will lead him to confront his traumatic past.

At the basis of the film is the novel 'Small Thigs Like These' by Claire Keegan, an Irish writer born in 1968, from whose works the film world had already drawn for 'The Quiet Girl', a 2022 film that reached an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature Film.

Piccole cose come queste e gli altri film della settimana
Photogallery4 foto

Both the novel and the film thus go back in time to take up the theme of the Magdalene Homes, women's institutions run on behalf of the Irish government by nuns of various Catholic orders. The purpose was ostensibly to reform 'lost young women', but the treatment suffered by the girls within these spaces was often appalling and they were exploited for very unspiritual matters.

Peter Mullan had also expressed himself on the same subject with his film 'Magdalene', winner of the Golden Lion at the 2002 Venice Film Festival, but Stephen Frears' 'Philomena' can also be mentioned among the titles on the subject.

A well-written but not always incisive film

Given the important underlying theme, this film could have been more incisive, although there are several biting sequences and the historical-political context that is told is rendered in a credible and realistic manner.

The writing is effective, especially in the portrayal of the main characters, but a few more flourishes would not have hurt in the direction of Tim Mielants, a name best known in the small screen universe for having directed important television series, such as 'The Terror' and 'Tales from the Loop'. Among these, however, a special mention goes to 'Peaky Blinders', an excellent series of which Mielants directed a few episodes and in which Cillian Murphy himself was the protagonist.

The Irish actor is undoubtedly the added value of this film as well: his performance is so powerful that it manages to conceal some of the limitations of a product that runs the risk of knowing something already seen and falls victim to some redundancy.

Hey Joe

A fairly similar fate is that of 'Hey Joe', a new film by the talented Italian director Claudio Giovannesi.

The latter, after having recounted youth so well in films such as 'Fiore' and 'La paranza dei bambini', focuses here mainly on a grown man trying to reconcile with his past.

The protagonist is Dean, an American veteran from New Jersey, who had an affair with a Neapolitan girl during the Second World War and is finally preparing to return to Italy, in the early 1970s, to meet his son. Dean would like to make up for twenty-five years of absence, but his son is now a man, has grown up in the underworld, has been adopted by a smuggling boss and has no interest in his American father.

There are sequences of a very high level, starting with a remarkable finale, but also some abrupt falls, caused by some passages that end up being not very credible: first of all, the baptism of the grandson a few days after Dean's arrival in Naples.

Giovannesi shoots with his customary stylistic strength, but the script suffers from a few faltering passages and the secondary characters are not treated with the proper attention.

James Franco's performance as Dean is good, but once again surprising is the naturalness of Francesco Di Napoli (as the protagonist's son), an actor who had made his screen debut with Claudio Giovannesi in 'La paranza dei bambini'.