The General

A Phoenix pick

John Boorman, the great director of Point Blank and Hope and Glory, is back in top form with his rollicking and poignant The General. The story of real-life Dublin criminal mastermind Martin Cahill (played in a tour de force performance by Brendan Gleeson), the film opens with his assassination by the IRA and flashes back to a career that takes him from a slum-dwelling youth (gleefully portrayed by The Butcher Boy's Eamonn Owens) pinching sweet rolls to his becoming leader of a gang whose daunting capers include the theft of a Vermeer. Boorman allows Gleeson a free hand in constructing the character, a scamp with a mass of tics (he's like Michael Moore on a sugar high) who's lovable until he nails an underling suspected of treachery to a pool table (that inevitable Irish Catholic imagery) and has his wife's sister move in with them to form a ménage à trois. Shadowed by his nemesis, a police inspector played by a raffishly sinister Jon Voight, abetted and undermined by associates played by a melancholy Adrian Dunbar and Joe Malone look-alike Sean McGinley, The General shambles to its fatal, final rendezvous with picaresque inevitability, outlining a portrait of Irish rebelliousness and complacency along the way. Screens at the Copley Place Monday, September 14 at 7:30 p.m. and Tuesday, September 15 at 1, 3, and 5:30 p.m. Director John Boorman will appear to introduce Monday's showing.

-- Peter Keough

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Film Festival Feature Films

| With Friends like These | Digging to China | Monument Ave. | Rounders | Lolita | God Said, 'Ha!' | My Son the Fanatic | The Mighty | Shattered Image | Gods and Monsters | Xui Xui: The Sent-Down Girl | Without Limits | Clubland | The Inheritors | The Celebration | Urban Ghost Story | The Boys | Living Out Loud | Stuart Bliss | The General | The Kindness of Strangers | Dancing at Lughnasa | Central Station | The Human Race | Double You Street | Oberwasser -- By U-boat to America | The Witman Boys | The Cruise | Confession of a Sexist Pig | Melting Pot |

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More Boston Film Festival information, film descriptions, and show times

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