City Cinema: Midwinter Break

Drama. PG, mature theme.
Dir: Polly Findlay, UK/Netherlands, 2026, 90 min.
Lesley Manville, Ciarán Hinds, Julie Lamberton.

Bernard MacLaverty’s multiple award-winning novel Midwinter Break (A Guardian/Sunday Times/Irish Times/Herald Scotland/Mail on Sunday Book of the Year and Winner of the Bord Gáis Novel of the Year!) comes to the screen with the dream cast of Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds. “MacLaverty reminds us why he is regarded as one of the greatest living Irish writers. A retired couple, Gerry and Stella Gilmore, fly from their home in Scotland to Amsterdam for a long weekend… Their relationship seems safe, easy, familiar. But over the course of the four days we discover the deep uncertainties that exist between them. Gerry, once an architect, is forgetful and set in his ways. Stella is tired of his lifestyle, worried about their marriage, and angry at his constant undermining of her religious faith. Things are not helped by memories that have begun to resurface of a troubled time in their native Ireland… Midwinter Break is the essential MacLaverty novel: accurate, compassionate observation; effortlessly elegant writing; and a tender, intimate, heartrending story. Yet it is also a profound examination of human love and how we live together, a chamber piece of real resonance and power. Forty years after his first book, MacLaverty has written his masterpiece.” —Goodreads