Claire Keegan Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Ahead of what looks to be a certain – at the time of writing – best actor win for his work on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy leads this absorbing drama from Belgian filmmaker Tim Mielants; a story about a working-class father who has questions about the local convent who has more than a hold on a small town in Ireland.Based upon the 2021 novel of the same name by Claire Keegan (whose previous work, Foster was adapted into The Quiet Girl to international acclaim), and from a screenplay by Enda Walsh, the film is set in the mid-eighties, specifically during the lead-up to Christmas. Murphy is Bill Furlong, owner of a small coal and fuel firm in the harbour town of Wexford on the southeastern coast of Ireland.

Alex Ritman Ireland appears to be everywhere on screen at the minute — and it isn’t just a trend. Where 2022 and 2023 had “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Paul Mescal, “The Quiet Girl” and short film “The Irish Goodbye” making noise throughout awards season, plus John Carney’s “Flora and Son” being snapped up in Sundance by Apple TV+, 2024 has already shown that the Irish industry has become a global force.

Cillian Murphy and Matt Damon are stepping out for the premiere of their new movie!

The Berlin Film Festival kicks off its 74th edition Thursday with the opening-night world premiere screening of Small Things Like These, the Irish drama starring Oscar-nominated Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy. It kicks of 10 days of movie debuts including for ones starring Rooney Mara, Isabelle Huppert, Gael García Bernal, Kristen Stewart and more.

Right from the start, there is no doubt where we are. Narrow, gray streets in the dim daylight of winter, peat hills between cramped villages, a crow sitting on a church spire: this is western Ireland in the ’80s, when the Celtic Tiger was yet to roar and jobs were scarce, divorce was illegal, condoms available only on prescription and central heating unknown.

Guy Lodge Film Critic From “28 Days Later” through to his recent, Oscar-nominated turn in “Oppenheimer,” Cillian Murphy has cultivated a reputation as a strong, silent type — all while resisting the inscrutability associated with that masculine cliché. His beautiful, sharp-boned face twitches and tightens and teems with feeling. Closeups always catch it thinking, wrestling with surges of vulnerability or violence, or watching other characters in turn.

EXCLUSIVE: Passing the time between Oppenheimer takes in a New Mexico bunker one morning at about 4am, Cillian Murphy and Matt Damon sowed the seeds of a future collaboration. Fast-forward to today, and Small Things Like These is opening the Berlin Film Festival. 

Alex Ritman With the 2023-24 awards season galloping towards the finish line, the whirlwind of ceremonies, red carpets, dinners and other glitzy occasions for feted stars of the moment to be feted some more is keeping most of the nominees exceptionally busy. Among the busiest must be Cillian Murphy, tipped to add both Oscar and BAFTA wins to the Golden Globe he’s already won for his lead turn in “Oppenheimer.” But just as his diary demands reach near farcical levels of back-to-back events, the Irish actor is making a quick detour to Germany to open the Berlinale.

EXCLUSIVE: On Thursday, the Berlin Film Festival will kick off with the world premiere of Small Things Like These, starring Cillian Murphy, who also produces, and marking the first time an Irish movie opens the Berlinale. In the exclusive first-look at the 1985-set drama (check it out above), Murphy’s family man Bill Furlong comes face-to-face with Emily Watson’s formidable Sister Mary whose convent is concealing dark and disturbing secrets.

Cillian Murphy will open the Berlin International Film Festival this year.Small Things Like These, directed by Peaky Blinders’ Tim Mielants, is based on the 2021 book by Irish author, Claire Keegan, and the screenplay has been written by Enda Walsh.The Oppenheimer star plays a devoted father and coal merchant named Bill Furlong. Set in 1980s Ireland, he discovers unsettling truths about the Magdalene Laundries, which were dreadful asylums run by the Roman Catholic church, said to house “fallen women”, mainly sex workers.The cast includes Belfast‘s Ciaran Hinds, Emily Watson (Chernobyl), Game Of Thrones’ Michelle Fairley, and Irish actor, Eileen Walsh, who also starred in a 2002 movie about the infamous asylums, titled The Magdalene Sisters.Murphy produced the film with Alan Moloney through their company, Big Things Films, alongside Catherine Magee.

Small Things Like These, an Irish-Belgian production. Directed by Tim Mielants from a screenplay by Enda Walsh, the international cast includes Cillian Murphy, Eileen Walsh, Michelle Fairley and Emily Watson.

Cillian Murphy movie Small Things Like These will open this year’s Berlinale.

Ellise Shafer “Small Things Like These,” a historical drama starring Cillian Murphy, is set to open this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Directed by Tim Mielants from a script by Enda Walsh, the film will have its world premiere in the festival’s competition on Feb. 15.

Katie Holmes is big on the arts. Not only is she involved in almost every stage of her projects, directing, writing, and starring in her own films; she’s also a big supporter of theater and literature. In a new interview, Holmes talked about what she’s reading and provided an update on her work.

EXCLUSIVE: Oppenheimer, A Quiet Place Part II and Peaky Blinders star Cillian Murphy is embarking on his next project with the feature adaptation of Claire Keegan’s acclaimed novel Small Things Like These. Murphy will star in and produce the film that’s been greenlighted by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Artists Equity which will finance the project. Principal photography is underway in Ireland.

Colm Bairéad’s appearance at Deadline’s Contenders: The Nominees event marks a year since his film The Quiet Girl first debuted at the Berlin Film Festival. A dual release in the UK and Ireland followed in May, and a slow international rollout has kept the director busy ever since. Indeed, as the film’s Oscar campaign enters the final stretch, The Quiet Girl is only now going wide across America: not bad going for a film with no stars that’s shot almost entirely in Irish, a language spoken by fewer than 2 million people worldwide.

For the last three years, the winner of the International Oscar has pretty much been a given: First came Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, then Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, and then Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car — all anointed by Cannes and eased to the finish line after prominent festival play in the usual cosmopolitan areas.

“I was just blown away,” director Colm Bairéad says of seeing the first audition tape of Catherine Clinch, the young girl who takes on the lead role of Cáit in his Irish-language Oscar entry The Quiet Girl. “She just had this immediate understanding of this character as someone who had learned to push all of her emotions inward and had learned to hide in a sense, in plain sight.”

Naman Ramachandran After 22 weeks in cinemas across Ireland and the U.K., writer-director Colm Bairéad’s “An Cailín Ciúin” (“The Quiet Girl”) has crossed €1 million ($971,000) at the box office. The film is Ireland’s entry in the Oscars’ international feature category. Based on Irish author Claire Keegan’s story “Foster,” the coming-of-age film, set in rural Ireland in 1981, follows Cáit (Catherine Clinch) as she is sent from her overcrowded, dysfunctional household to live with distant relatives for the summer. It has been an unstoppable force on the festival and awards circuit, winning top prizes at the Berlin, Dublin and Taipei film festivals and sweeping the Irish Film and Television Awards. Produced by Cleona Ní Chrualaoi for Inscéal, the film is distributed by Break Out Pictures and Curzon.

Super has taken North American rights to Colm Bairéad’s award-winning drama The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin), which was recently announced as Ireland’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards and selected for the 2022 European Film Awards.

Lily James scandal.  The screen star, 51, dressed to impress in a white shirt, black trousers and red belt as he enjoyed an evening of T. S.

LONDON -- Novels by Damon Galgut and Colm Toibin are among eight books contending for Britain’s Rathbones Folio Prize for literature.Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning South African story “The Promise” and Toibin’s novel about Thomas Mann, “The Magician,” were on the shortlist announced Wednesday for the multi-genre 30,000 pound ($41,000) prize.They are up against four other works of fiction: Natasha Brown’s debut novel “Assembly;” Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These;” Gwendoline Riley’s “My Phantoms;” and Sunjeev Sahota’s “China Room.”Contenders also include Selima Hill’s poetry collection “Men Who Feed Pigeons” and “Albert and the Whale,” Philip Hoare’s nonfiction book about the artist Albrecht Dürer.The winner, chosen by a jury of three other writers, will be announced on March 23.Founded in 2013 to rival the prestigious Booker Prize, the Folio is open to fiction, nonfiction and poetry from anywhere in the world published in Britain.

“Small Things Like These,” by Claire Keegan (Grove Press)“Small Things Like These” is a gem of a slim novel about a family man faced with a moral decision.In just 114 pages, the book introduces readers to Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in a small Irish town. “Furlong had come from nothing,” writes Keegan.