McDonagh debut comes to Dublin

Given its world premiere at the Sundance festival in the US last week, In Bruges , Martin McDonagh's feature film debut as writer- director, is set for its European premiere as the opening presentation of the 6th Jameson Dublin International Film Festival on February 15th, writes Michael Dwyer .

A dark comedy-thriller, it stars Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell as professional assassins hiding out in the medieval Belgian city after a London hit goes disastrously wrong.

The complete programme for the 10-day festival will be available online from midnight next Tuesday at www.dubliniff.com

Linklater takes on Welles

Director Richard Linklater will follow Fast Food Nation with Me and Orson Welles , based on Robert Kaplow's coming-of-age novel set in New York in 1937, shortly before Welles, when he was 22, opened the Mercury Theatre.

Zac Efron, the teen heartthrob star of High School Musical and Hairspray , plays a student Welles discovers on the streets of Manhattan. Welles casts him in his stage production of Julius Caesar, which transposed Shakespeare's play to Fascist-era Rome.

Christian McKay plays Welles, with Ben Chaplin as English actor George Coulouris.

Bidding war for Polanski doc

The first significant distribution deal at this year's Sundance festival was for a documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired .

Harvey Weinstein outbid several other distributors for the film, which re-examines the 1977 case in which Polish native Polanski was convicted of unlawful intercourse with a minor. He fled the US and has lived in Europe ever since.

US TV channel ESPN picked up the broadcast rights to another documentary at Sundance, Kicking It . Narrated by Colin Farrell, it charts the experiences of seven players in the annual Homeless World Cup soccer heats.

Linney torn between two lovers

Interviewed in this newspaper last weekend, Laura Linney talked about the coincidence of being married in films so often to characters played by Irish actors - Gabriel Byrne in A Simple Twist of Fate , PS and Jindabyne , and Liam Neeson in Kinsey and on stage in The Crucible .

Linney is levelling the score with Richard Eyre's The Other Man , in which she and Neeson again play a married couple.

The twist is that she disappears and he discovers e-mails and phone messages linking her to another man (Antonio Banderas). Ironically, perhaps, it starts shooting on St Valentine's Day.

Shake with the Devil - and Willie O'Dea

The World Witness Film Festival, running at the Belltable in Limerick from next Thursday to February 3rd, will present a programme of films that illuminate the human condition across the world.

Screenings will include Shake Hands with the Devil , about the Rwandan genocide, followed by an appearance by justice minister Willie O'Dea, who will speak on the role of UN peacekeepers as Irish troops embark for Chad.

Gay Filipino nurse Fidel Taguinod will discuss Here to Stay , the documentary on his experiences over two years in Ireland.

The strong line-up includes Days of the Glory , the award-winning film of Algerian soldiers fighting for the French during the second World War, and God Grew Tired of Us , on the civil war in Sudan.

Anime and manga in the limelight

An attractive programme of screenings and discussions exploring anime (Japanese animation) and manga (Japanese comic books) will be held at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin next weekend

It begins on Friday night with a rare screening of Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984). www.cbl.ie

Have I got a movie for you?

Private Eye editor Ian Hislop , a regular panellist on Have I Got News for You, turns screenwriter, collaborating with Nick Newman from Spitting Image.

A Bunch of Amateurs features an ostensibly unlikely cast of Burt Reynolds, Imelda Staunton, Derek Jacobi and Samantha Bond for a tale in which Reynolds plays an ageing Hollywood star attempting to revive his career with a Shakespearean production in a small English village.

Mature movie fans

The new Pictures Film Club begins a programme for audiences aged over 55 next Monday afternoon at the Axis arts and community resource centre in Ballymun, Dublin with a 2pm screening of Some Like it Hot .

Subsequent screenings will include About Schmidt , The Swinging 60s and The Painted Veil .

The club has been set up by Axis and the arts office of Dublin City Council, in association with the IFI and Access Cinema.

© 2008 The Irish Times