Jordan aims high but fails to provide many real thrills

Looking back over Neil Jordan’s filmography – 18 movies in 30 years, from Angel (1982) to Byzantium (2012) – you notice how often he has been drawn to the operatic, the seedy, the camp, the gloriously over the top. He turned Patrick McCabe’s bog-Gothic masterpiece The Butcher Boy into a hallucinatory riff on the grim truth of Ireland in the 1950s. In The Company of Wolves (1984), he found a cinematic equivalent for ...