This is Lyons Den Radio, I’m Jeffrey Lyons looking at Calvary. 

The wonderful Irish actor Brendan Gleeson stars as the father of a grown daughter, a widower who then joined the priesthood. As the movie begins he’s taking confession, and the unseen penitence says he’s been molested as a child for years by a priest who has now died; ruining the man’s life. So he plans to seek revenge by killing Gleeson’s character a week from Sunday on the beach. The rest of the movie has us wondering who the victim/culprit might be. British born Kelly Riley who passes for an Irish Colleen and who is currently starring in the Black Box on NBC, is his daughter who’d recently tried to commit suicide. Now there’s the adulteress in the town, her tolerant husband played by Chris O’Dowd, a gay prostitute, a bartender, and a rich divorced alcoholic man and other types all of whom might be the killer. Gleeson’s character is rich with doubt, humor, anger, and he’s up to the task of conveying a complex man at a crossroads. All in Calvary, one of the better films of the summer and maybe of the year. That’s Lyons Den Radio and I’m Jeffery Lyons.

Calvary is a Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Jeffrey Lyons, a movie and theatre critic with 44 years of experience on TV, radio, and in print, is at work on his seventh book, Wasn’t It a Time, and you can catch him on Lyons Den Radio, heard locally on WCBS Radio.