releasing this week: Edge of Darkness & Precious

Couple to look out for this week, Edge of Darkness and Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. Precious is really the one I’m looking forward to but unfortunately it’s only releasing on 4 screens in Ireland so it may be difficult for people to get to see it. Edge of Darkness on the other hand is all over the place so you should have no trouble finding it in a cinema near you.

Edge of Darkness first. Edge of Darkness is a remake of a BBC tv series of the same name by the same director, Martin Campbell. He also directed a couple of Bond films, GoldenEye and Casino Royale to be specific. So decent action pedigree there.

The original 1985 tv series is apparently extremely well regarded. I’d never heard of it myself but Wikipedia (and a quick check of their references) reveals that it was #3 on Channel 4 50 Greatest TV Dramas… so far so good.

Watching the trailer it would also appear that Mel Gibson is back to his old ass-kicking self. Which is nice to see, he seemed to have lost his way for a while. Course who knows where he’s at really but at least the movies are back to normal.

Aside from all that it looks like fairly standard action/thriller fare. A cop’s daughter is murdered on his doorstep and he’s out to find out who killed her. Turns out that’s not a simple task. While it doesn’t sound overly exciting if the directing, acting and story are good then it could be a pretty entertaining two hours or so.

Like I said, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire is the one I’m really looking forward though.

Now it looks like it’s going to be a hard one watch. Precious is an overweight, illiterate, black, pregnant teenager living in an abusive household who doesn’t seem to have a hope in hell. When she’s invited to enroll in an alternative school there seems to be a glimmer of hope for her… Maybe that sounds a bit dodgy. I’ll link to the trailer instead and you can see what I’m talking about.

click image to watch the trailer on youtube.com

It’s won a whole host of awards and for whatever reason I’m in the mood for drama lately so I’ll be going along in any case. If it looks good to you I’d recommend going along to either the Lighthouse Cinema, Smithfield, the IFI, Cineworld or The Screen on D’olier street soon as. With so few prints in the country I don’t know how long this one will be around.

Edge of Darkness and Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire are in Irish cinemas from Friday 29th January 2010.