Film Club week at Birr Theatre

The Film Club"s presentation next Tuesday, January 20, is "Before the Devil Knows Your Dead". This is surely a jewel in the career of the veteran director Sidney Lumet, and has been compared with with his 1975 classic Dog Day Afternoon as well as with Reservoir Dogs and Kubrick"s The Killing. No film could announce more clearly that crime doesn"t pay. It is the story of two brothers, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke. Hoffman is Andy, a real estate businessman who has worked his way up the greasy corporate ladder, while Ethan Hawke is a waster with a drinking problem, permanently unemployed and permanently at war with his ex-wife for not coughing up alimony. Both men have pressing money worries. Andy is addicted to heroin, while Hank has promised his estranged daughter some money. So Andy bullies Hank into robbing a jewellery store. Hank is uncomfortable with this, and the terror begins once the job goes horribly wrong. Meanwhile, the January film for older people is "Mrs Henderson Presents" next Friday, January 23. This is a wicked musical-drama by Stephen Frears, starring Dame Judi Dench who delivers a captivating performance as an upper class widow who buys a dilapidated Soho theatre and turns it into a nude revue which never closes during the Second World War. It"s impossible not to warm to the movie, which combines a quirky showbiz tale with stiff upper lips in war-torn London. West Offaly Community Transport bus will stop at the theatre in time for the film on the evening. Contact Birr Theatre for more information, the box office is open 1pm to 5.30pm Monday to Friday, phone 057 9122911 or check out www.birrtheatre.com.