To buy

Pat Comer's fly-on-the-dressing-room-wall account of the progress of the Galway football team to All-Ireland success last summer…

Pat Comer's fly-on-the-dressing-room-wall account of the progress of the Galway football team to All-Ireland success last summer is a sheer delight. Beautifully shot and impeccably paced, it succeeds in giving a real flavour of the tension and excitement of the championship, while conveying both the individual dramas and social context of the story. A perfect Christmas present for fans, but it's also much more than that - it's probably the best film ever made about sport in Ireland.

To rent

"Sliding Doors" (15)

Sporting a convincing Estuary accent, Gwyneth Paltrow plays a young Londoner with serious romantic problems, who finds that she has been fired and, on her way home, misses her train by a millisecond. Or does she? Writer/director Peter Howitt's engaging, undemanding debut splits in two, following the very different consequences of missing or catching that train. It's a neat idea, the sort of what-if cinematic trick that works well for romantic comedy, with good supporting performances from John Lynch, Jeanne Tripplehorne and John Hannah.

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"Western" (15)

Manuel Poirier's picaresque road movie is an engagingly offbeat meditation on the human need for affection and companionship, with Sergi Lopez as a suave Spanish salesman and Sacha Bourdo a diminutive Russian vagrant, who form an unlikely alliance and set off on a meandering hitchhiking journey around Brittany, getting drunk and propositioning women along the way. Poirier's affectionate, apparently ramshackle style is in sympathy with his off-beat perceptiveness about human nature.

Hugh Linehan

Hugh Linehan

Hugh Linehan is an Irish Times writer and Duty Editor. He also presents the weekly Inside Politics podcast