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Well, I didn’t manage to catch the Jaws night at The Electric, but I did venture out to the picture palace twice in the last week.

The Guillermo Del Toro produced, Juan Antonia Bayona helmed The Orphanage was rather good. More of a good old-fashioned ghost story than an out-and-out horror pic (despite one visceral scene that was a pure, popcorn-into-the-back-of-head-in-front shocker), it reminded me a bit of The Others. Haunting, atmospheric and melancholic-in-a-good-way, but – in my humble opinion – not really deserving the comparisons to Del Toro’s sublime masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth.

The other film was In Bruges, which was tremendous fun. Colin Farrell and the mighty Brendan Gleeson play two hitmen lying low in the Low Countries after a job goes tragically wrong. Painfully funny, jaw-droppingly politically incorrect and highly recommended, it reminds me of those great, edgy British films that George Harrison’s Handmade Films used to knock out in the late 1980s.

Go see.