Brian Kirk Movies

A former Manchester gangster living Ireland ventures back to his old stomping grounds to clear his teenage son of murder charges, and realizes that he may never make it out alive in this mini-series written by Emmy winner Frank Deasey and starring Dougray Scott. Michael (Scott) had a reputation as one of the meanest thugs in Manchester, but during his stint in prison his wife was brutally murdered. Upon his release, Michael abandons his 15 year old son Sean, and plans to start a new life in Ireland. But just Michael's his girlfriend prepares to give birth to their first child, Michael learns that his son has been implicated in a fatal shooting back home. Determined not to sit idly by as Sean careens down the same destructive path that he once did, the repentant father returns to Manchester determined to set things right. Unfortunately for Michael, not everyone is willing to forgive and forget. Now as the man who murdered his wife goes on trial, Michael contends with a vindictive cop who seeks to lock him up for good, and prepares to sacrifice everything in exchange for his son's freedom. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Brian Kirk's gothic thriller Middletown excoriates the actions and attitudes of the Irish Catholic clergy by honing in on one psychotically deranged fire-and-brimstone preacher. Matthew MacFadyen is Gabriel Hunter, a priest fresh from missions work in Africa. After 15 years of service in the field, Gabriel returns to his hometown in Ireland to occupy the now-vacant pulpit. Once there, he re-encounters three members of his working-class brood: his father, Bill Hunter (Gerard McSorley); his younger brother, the service station attendant Jim (Daniel Mays); and Jim's expectant wife Caroline (Eva Birthistle), who runs the local speakeasy. The family welcomes Gabriel home, but from the first moments of his arrival, he projects a violent, hair-trigger temper; relentless, psychopathic bursts of unchecked anger; and a sadistic obsession with inflicting pain and cruelty on everything and everyone around him -- from squelching live mice beneath his heels to strangling the neck of a chicken that he seizes during a cockfight. From the pulpit, Gabriel uses sermons to relentlessly damn the members of his congregation for their sins, including all activity at the local pub, which he perceives as a den of iniquity. When Gabriel hears Caroline's refusal to have her child baptized, the statement pushes him completely over the edge and triggers a string of increasingly violent acts that will bring the entire community to its knees -- and threaten the lives and safety of Bill, Jim, Caroline, and the newborn baby. Daragh Carville authored the script. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

Keanu Reeves stars in this romantic sci-fi drama about a space traveler who awakens 90 years before reaching his destination at a distant colony, and rouses a female passenger (Reese Witherspoon) to avoid a lonely death among the stars. Over the course of the following years, love begins to blossom in the cold vacuum of space. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi