Calvary (2014)

Father James (Brendan Gleeson) is a Catholic priest serving a small Irish coastal community. One day a man enters the confession booth and warns Father James that he is going to shoot him dead the following Sunday. Over the remainder of the week, James grows increasingly confronted as the people of the town seems to uniformly goad and mock him, and he suffers unexpected attacks on his life and those closest to him.

Calvary is an independent British/Irish drama by writer/director John Michael McDonagh, following in the footsteps of his highly regarded playwright and screenwriter brother Martin McDonagh (In Bruges). It has a deeply idiosyncratic, bleakly comic tone to much of the film, and brings together an excellent cast to bring the odd, troublesome town to life. The film centres upon a career-best performance by Brendan Gleeson, but sadly it is weakened considerably by a deeply uneven and occasionally flat-out ridiculous screenplay. Gleeson's performance and some excellent cinematography by Larry Smith pulls the viewer through, but in more than a few moments it is a bit of a rough ride.

John Ford: Dreaming the Quiet Man (2010)

John Ford remains one of the most significant and respected film directors in American history. His name seems synonymous with the American western, and the war film. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestowed upon him the Best Director Oscar on no less than four separate occasions. Many of his films - including Stagecoach (1939), The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) - are beloved classics.

While he seems the definitive American director, he was actually born John Martin Feeney in 1894 to Irish immigrant parents. He may have been a naturally born American, but he held a strong love for his Irish ancestry for his whole life. In 1952 he satisfied a 20 year-long ambition to direct The Quiet Man, an adaptation of a Maurice Walsh short story in which an Irish-born American (played in the film by John Wayne) returns to his home town and falls in love with a local woman there (Maureen O'Hara). It became Ford's most popular and commercially successful film to date, and led to Ford's fourth Academy Award as director.

The making of the film, and Ford's personal connection to Ireland, are extensively detailed in John Ford: Dreaming the Quiet Man. It is a feature-length 2010 documentary from Irish filmmaker Se Merry Doyle.