• Cameron Menzies: A Bohemian Rhapsody

    Storytelling on the grandest musical scale returns to Belfast when Northern Ireland Opera dusts itself off after a difficult eighteen months to present Giacomo Puccini’s much-loved opera La Bohème. This Parisian story of lust for life, of artists struggling to make ends meet and of uncertain futures, chimes loudly with these times. For NI Opera’s Artistic Director Cameron Menzies, who only took up the post in March, the road to La Bohème has been something of an opera in itself. “It’s been extraordinary,” the Australian laughs. “Yes, it’s a massive undertaking but people have worked so hard, with such dedication…

  • Color Out of Space

    After his quarter-century exile from feature filmmaking, writer-director Richard Stanley returns with Lovecraftian passion project Color Out Of Space. It adapts H. P. Lovecraft’s short story of the same name, where an asteroid strikes a remote New England farm, unleashing an incomprehensible alien entity which begins to infect the bodies and minds of the family it finds there.  The combination of the excellent source material and Stanley—who even when his films were run ragged by studio interference remained a strikingly distinct visual stylist—should have made for an abundantly weird film, and yet the results are disappointingly orthodox. There is potential,…

  • Parasite

    In the dystopic locomotion of 2013’s Snowpiercer, Bong Joon Ho charted social hierarchy along the X axis. His new film, the Palme d’Or-netting Parasite, swaps horizontal for vertical, delivering a nasty update of the upstairs/downstairs formula for the South Korean service economy. It starts, quite literally, underground. A teenage brother and sister sprinting through the Kim family’s basement flat in a panic, trailing phones along the ceiling to snag a stray thread of WiFi. Their ground-level window offers a view of shoes and trouser bottoms, the alley’s pissed and pissing. The smog of city fumigators seeps in, fogging the domicile like…

  • The Lighthouse

    At the beginning of Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) arrives on a remote island with his superior, Tom Wake (Willem Dafoe), to tend to the titular beacon. Their path, along steep craggy cliffs in howling winds, was difficult, but there will be no relief inside either. As Winslow bumps his head on the low ceiling of their shared upstairs quarters, Wake is already urinating into a chamber pot, farting and barking orders about Winslow’s duties.  Life on the island is hard. Winslow’s tasks are back-breaking and seemingly never-ending, everything but the more rewarding nursing the light itself – a…

  • Uncut Gems

    Uncut Gems, writer-directors Josh & Benny Safdie’s fifth feature together, starts full throttle and only occasionally lets up. It is fixed to the world and worldview of Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a jeweller for the stars in New York’s diamond district: a chancer and grifter, thriving in an ecosystem of insatiable avarice. As it becomes rapidly clear, he is a man that gets both a hit and an identity from triumphing over the constant barrage of knife-edge negotiations and impossible odds. Or, failing that, just surviving them. Ratner juggles his family life, with kids he is provisionally interested in and…

  • Little Women

    Grab the green bin. Greta Gerwig’s dropped in one last gift. Little Women, the seventh cinematic (re)telling of Louisa May Alcott’s much-loved novel, is a perfect film for the dark, weird, listless days that trot along right behind Christmas. It’s Gerwig’s third directorial effort, and the second time she’s written and directed, after the slow-burn brilliance of 2017’s Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan’s best movie). The ensemble domestic drama follows the troubles and triumphs of the March’s, a contented but economically limited household in Civil War-era Massachusetts, as four sisters and their mother await their pastor patriarch’s return from the conflict,…

  • Le Mans ’66 (Ford v Ferrari)

    Is this film a Ford, or a Ferrari? Le Mans ‘66 (titled Ford v Ferrari in other territories) is pretty clear about which one it would like to be. Ford is ugly; Ferrari is beautiful. Ford spits its cars out with production-line urgency, in drab plants overseen by Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts), a wounded capitalist nursing second-generation anxiety, whose generous girth symbolises his enterprise’s quantitative bloat. Ferrari’s vehicles, on the other hand, are products of artisanal care and Mediterranean exuberance. Ford is efficiency; Ferrari is eros.  James Mangold’s film sides with the dreamers. It opens with a quasi-mystical voiceover…

  • Monos

    Every so often, a movie comes along that completely rips up the rule book of filmmaking. Alejandro Landes’ (2011’s Porfirio) does so right from the beginning of Monos, with its unforgettable and surreal opening sequence of young protagonists playing football with blindfolds in some undisclosed, ethereal landscape in a Latin American mountain range, surrounded by clouds, as some sort of awareness drill,. The viewer’s attention is shoved, almost in a voyeuristic manner, into their bizarre, hedonistic, militaristic, yet juvenile world. The story progresses at a relentless pace into its premise and finale, leaving the viewer in awe at this wonderfully relevant, strangely realistic, yet ruthlessly brutal…

  • The Peanut Butter Falcon

    “Yeah you’re gonna die, it’s a matter of time. That ain’t the question; question is if they have good stories to tell about you when you’re gone,” opines Tyler (Shia LaBeouf). The hot-headed, low-rung outlaw on the run (he torched a rival crab trawler’s gear), is giving life lessons to his accidental travelling companion, Zak (Zack Gottsagen), a 22 year-old with Down’s Syndrome making his own escape. The Peanut Butter Falcon, the first feature from American writers and directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz, is an open-hearted yarn about good stories and good times, a rough-it-out best-pals adventure that moves with leisurely charm. Tyler is Zak’s guide, road buddy and…

  • Joker

    Joker lands in cinemas this week – as heavy with hype as Batman’s toolbelt with gadgets. Not that gadgets and superheroism play a big part in this origin story, which shows the backstory of Batman’s arch-nemesis. Instead, following in the footsteps of the violent adaptations Logan and Deadpool, Joker is a bracingly bleak, gorgeously shot departure from the conventions of the comic book spin-off movie, anchored (if not dominated) by a magnetic central performance from Joaquin Phoenix. The film unfolds in a 1970s-feel Gotham City that’s politically and socially tearing itself apart. (The first evidence of unrest is mounds of uncollected…