Snowden: Oliver Stone's uncharacteristically sombre whistleblower drama with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, opens in Irish cinemas this weekend.
He stars as the titular National Security Agency contractor who, in 2013, exposed the US Government's global surveillance programme.
The film opens with Snowden's meeting in a Hong Kong hotel with documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald (Zachery Quinto) and then flashes back and forth across the
young man's life to show how he got to this point: his abortive attempt to join the US Special Forces, his introduction to the CIA, his meeting with his future wife (Shailene Woodley) and ultimately, his discovery of the nefarious uses of surveillance technology.
We'll be carrying an exclusive interview with Stone on The Picture Show, this Saturday at 6pm.
Birth of a Nation: Actor, writer and co-producer turned director Nate Parker's partly self-financed drama about a preacher who led a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831.
Birth of a Nation was enthusiastically received at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and was cited as a
future Oscar prospect until it was alleged that Parker was involved in the rape of a fellow student at Pennsylvania State University in 1999.
The rape allegations have dogged Parker and the film since - and the movie has "bombed" at the box office. It also stars Armie Hammer, Penelope Ann Miller, Jackie Earl Haley and Gabrielle Union.
I Am Not a Serial Killer: Cork director Billy O'Brien's accomplished mix of horror, thriller and science fiction based on the young adult series of the same name by Dan Wells.
It centres on a teenager in a small, snowbound Midwestern town, a diagnosed - if sympathetic - sociopath who must hunt down a paranormal serial killer who is murdering local people and stealing their body organs. Partly financed by the Irish Film Board, it stars Max Record from Where the Wild Things Are and veteran Christopher Lloyd.
I Am not a Serial Killer will run on ten screen across the country from Friday.
Life, Animated: Deeply involving documentary about an autistic boy who learns to communicate by reciting memorised dialogue from Disney's animated features.
From the age of three Owen Suskind had withdrawn into himself and was unable to talk, until his parents realised that he was speaking to them through lines from Bambi, Peter Pan, Dumbo, The Jungle Book, The Lion King and other Disney classics.
Adapted from an account of Owen's life by his father Ron and directed by Roger Ross Williams, Life, Animated is one of 15 movies that have been shortlisted for the Best Documentary at the forthcoming Academy Awards.
United States of Love inter-links four different stories in a dull Polish town in 1990 just as the Soviet empire is beginning to crumble.
Far from experiencing liberation, the four women at the centre of the narrative are oppressed by inner desperation as they turn to sex and religion for meaning and escape.
United States of Love is in the Irish Film Institute.
