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Junior Film Season Dec 26th - Dec 28th   Admission €3 per film   All Screenings in Parochial Hall, Step Road @ 3:00pm

The Cineclub received funding from Tipperary North VEC which allows us develop the activities of the club and reach a wider audience and for the younger film buffs in Cloughjordan! MANY THANKS TO Tipperary North VEC

The Polar Bear

26th December

James and the Giant Peach

27th December

Whale Rider

28th December

26th Dec           The Polar Bear   Dir: Thilo Rothkirch    Gemany / Switzerland / USA    2001    78 mins    GEN                                        (In English) Lars is a fluffy white cub, who can't swim. When he makes friends with Robbie, the grown-up bears are horrified. Seals are nosh, not nice, they tell him. Being young and unprejudiced, he ignores them. Lars and Robbie become inseparable. Slowly charm infuses sentiment and the film wins you over. At the end, after incredible adventures that take him to a tropical island, hitches a ride with a killer whale, finds him trapped on an ice flow in mountainous green seas and witnesses a battle with an evil factory ship, Lars is told, "You are the best little polar bear that ever was," and you find yourself on your feet, applauding, for heaven's sake. Can the power of animation be so strong? It helps having the mental age of a six-year-old. The Little Polar Bear is based on stories by Hans de Beer and made in Holland by Thilo Rothkirch and Piet de Rycker. In the same way that Raymond Briggs, in his Snowman books, creates a world as safe as mummy's breath, there is always a hint of danger. Without fear, happiness is a plastic duck. "If you never give up, you can never be defeated," Caruso, the loopy penguin, says and yet the lemmings continue to jump over cliffs because they're so depressed. Little ones, who were scared rigid by Sid's room in Toy Story, will love this.  © iol.film review

27th Dec           James and the Giant Peach Dir:  Brad Bird    USA    1999    86 mins    U (UK) Made by the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, this has an enchanting, at times ghoulish, appeal. An adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic story, Selick's film may not have made any spectacular technical advance on his previous work (the animated central section is sandwiched by stylised live-action sequences), but, despite a lightness of plot, it most beautifully captures the book's free-floating, fantastic sense of adventure and wonder. Forced into a life of drudgery by his evil aunts Sponge and Spiker (Margolyes and Lumley), orphan James dreams of escape to New York. An old man (Postlethwaite) appears and gives the boy a jigging handful of fluorescent, magical crocodile tongues. A dead peach tree bears a gigantic fruit, and diving Alice-like into its core, James enters a world of strange invertebrates. As his wishes take flight, so does the peach, putting to sea and soaring up in the air, hauled majestically by a flock of tethered sea-gulls. The songs and music have the inimitable signature of Randy Newman.  © Time Out

28th Dec           Whale Rider Dir: Niki Caro    New Zealand / Germany    2002    105 mins    PG      Be on the lookout for this one. There's magic in it. Having  earned prizes at film festivals from Sundance to Toronto, Whale Rider is a crowd-pleaser in the best sense of the word: It wins you over without cheating. You look at the remarkable face of Keisha Castle-Hughes, only eleven when the film was shot, and you're hooked. She plays Pai, a Maori girl being raised by her grandparents, Koro (Rawiri Paratene) and Nanny Flowers (Vicky Haughton), in contemporary New Zealand. Her father ran off after his wife died giving birth to Pai and her twin brother, who also died. That will leave the tribe without a leader when Koro dies, since girls are considered unfit to lead. Pai has other ideas. As Koro educates local boys in ancient mysticism and the martial arts, Pai trains in secret, evoking the anger of Koro, whose ancestor, legend has it, arrived in their village on the back of a whale. Director Niki Caro, who adapted Wite Ihimaera's novel, has made a film of female empowerment that resonates deeply. Castle-Hughes is a star in in the making. She and her movie are worth cheering for. - Peter Travers © Rolling Stone

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