Ash Wednesday

In 1983, in the Irish ghetto of Hell's Kitchen, New York, one-time gangland enforcer Francis Sullivan (Burns) is none too pleased that his supposedly dead brother Sean (Wood) went walkabouts around the neighbourhood last night. Today - Ash Wednesday, penitence day, clock it - half their acquaintances are out to lay ghosts back in their grave. Shot in a smoggy palette of whisky and nicotine-infused yellows, the film is crisply composed, but the dialogue is thick-tongued and the drama dismally flat. Actor/director Burns (The Brother McMullen) has always liked to make his stories family affairs, but few would have made so little of a protagonist who's been squiring his brother's wife (Dawson) for the three years since she thought she was widowed.