The Tiger's Tail.

Kevin Maher profiles John Boorman for the London Times: "The 74-year-old London-born director of classics such as Deliverance and Excalibur has been savaged in Ireland for his satirical portrayal of the country in The Tiger's Tail. Here Boorman, resident in Ireland for nearly 35 years, depicts the Emerald Isle as a decadent Sodom and Begorrah defined by rampant greed, binge drinking, street violence, suicide, racism and glaring social inequality."

Updated through 6/11.

One click over, James Christopher writes that the film that opened the EuroCinema: New Films From Europe series in Los Angeles "works like a modern and gloomy fairytale. The premise is wonderful, but the director fails to clamp down a vital sense of credibility."

"Brendan Gleeson, so good in Boorman's The General, takes on the double role of separated-at-birth Irish twins, in a plot that suggests The Prince and the Pauper redone as a quasi-Hitchcockian thriller," writes the Telegraph's Tim Robey.

"It's a little like the old 1971 Basil Dearden movie The Man Who Haunted Himself, but without the supernatural tension," suggests the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.

Ireland is "the country with the largest divide between rich and poor in Europe, its streets full of drunken young people and clogged up with traffic," notes Derek Malcolm, too, in the Evening Standard. "Added to that, its health service is at breaking point."

Rob Carnevale talks with Boorman for IndieLondon, where Jack Foley interviews Kim Cattrall and reviews the film as well: "Politically, it has the potential to open a volatile debate about property and wealth that everyone can relate to - but emotionally it fails to grip and operates in dubious moral territory. For a filmmaker of Boorman's calibre that's all the more disappointing."

Update, 6/11: "The Tiger's Tail is a flawed movie that works better as a fable than as a direct reflection of reality; some of it is surprisingly heavy-handed, especially scenes involving the left-wing son," writes Philip French in the Observer. "But Gleeson is excellent, there are several deeply moving scenes involving Sinead Cusack and generally it's a fascinating, thoughtful contribution to the dramatic literature of doubles, twins and doppelgangers that stretches from The Comedy of Errors to The Prisoner of Zenda."

Posted by dwhudson at June 10, 2007 2:12 PM