Lost & Found

Two decades have passed since Liam O Mochain smuggled George Clooney, Warren Beatty, Catherine Deneuve and Kenneth Branagh and others into his debut film, The Book That Wrote Itself (1999), and he's still flying by the seat of his pants in this third feature, which was filmed piecemeal over five years. Such fragmentation presents the odd problem that editor Ciara Brophy can't quite solve. But, as this endearing Irish comedy is comprised of seven interwoven storylines, the odd continuity blip gets lost in the warp and weft. At the heart of the mostly fact-based proceedings is O Mochain himself, who works at the Lost & Found office at Portarlington Station in rural County Laois. However, he fetches up in Poland after grandmother Barbara Adair asks him to retrieve a bracelet she had buried before her Kindertransport exodus. Beggar Liam Carney also goes on an eventful journey, but scrappy scripting and/or awkward acting means that not all of the vignettes hold together so successfully.