14 years after Martin McDonagh’s feature film directorial debut IN BRUGES, he has reunited with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson for THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN, a quieter and arguably much darker film about a different splintered friendship, with similar ideas about morality, mortality, and guilt. We’re joined once again by critic Siddhant Adlakha to talk over some of those ideas as they play out in BANSHEES, how they color where our sympathies lie in the civil war between the film’s protagonists, and how much any of that matters when considering this story as a metaphor. Then we bring IN BRUGES into the discussion to consider how both films tap into McDonagh’s particular cinematic and comedic rhythms, use their female characters as a corrective to impulsive and irrational male behavior, and conclude with a choose-your-ending ambiguity. And in Your Next Picture Show, we talk over a different pairing we considered for this week and our reactions to the film that inspired it: WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY
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Outro music: “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine” by The Killers
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