• Annabelle: Creation

    August 8, 2017 - By 

    Someone call a priest. It’s last rites time. Studio horror is dead, or at least consistent in its undeadness; zombie movies, creaking bags of tricks with empty centres, haunted bodies without spirit. Warner Bros’ prequel-spinoff Annabelle: Creation, which sets up the origin story for the titular haunted doll of 2014’s lifeless Annabelle, confirms this. The latest offshoot from James Wan’s highly successful, ever expanding The Conjuring franchise (future releases include The Conjuring 3 and spinoffs The Nun and The Crooked Man), Creation is a box-ticking exercise with zero dread and a reminder of how essential the personalities of Patrick Wilson…

  • Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

    August 4, 2017 - By 

    Modern blockbuster film-making is calling out for a new The Fifth Element, but Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets isn’t it. Two decades after Luc Besson’s classically garish retro-future space opera, he’s returned to the same aesthetic; it’s another summer film based on a comic book, sure, but not what you would expect. Valerian is based on the French comic series Valérian and Laureline, written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières, which began its run in the pre-Star Wars sixties. Besson, a long-time fan of the series, obviously drew on it for 1997’s weirdo favourite, and…

  • Hounds of Love

    August 2, 2017 - By 

    For his debut feature, Australian film-maker Ben Young returns to his Perth roots, subjecting his hometown to a predator’s gaze. Psychological abduction thriller Hounds of Love opens with a pervs-eye view of teenage girls playing netball, the slow-motion camera tracking bodily curves and the wafting of skirts while a couple watch from their car, and then offer one of the unfortunate girls a lift home. Later in the film, as the depravity of the married kidnappers becomes clearer, a tracking shot line-up of unassuming detached houses frames the buildings as hostile sites, the carefree, slow-mo routines of family life now…

  • Captain Underpants

    July 31, 2017 - By 

    Unsurprising news: Captain Underpants is a silly movie. Surprising news: it’s also not bad. Based on Dav Pilkey’s popular children’s novels of the same name and directed by David Soren (Turbo), DreamWorks’ Captain Underpants pretty much comes as advertised: it’s about a big, dumb guy in Y-fronts and a cape. Like the book series, the Underpants movie centres on two fourth-grade best friends and neighbours, George Beard (Kevin Hart) and Harold Hutchkins (Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch), and their efforts to inject a bit of life into their grim middle school existence, under the authoritarian grip of principal Mr. Krupp (Ed…

  • Girls Trip

    July 28, 2017 - By 

    Some movies are made for audiences. Not in a buck-passing ‘we made it for the fans, not the critics’ way that follows deserved Tomatometer mauling. It’s rather that in certain contexts, a movie’s qualities can be amplified, and its flaws made to seem less important. The Fifty Shades movies, for example, were marketed as ‘events’, a go-to destination for gaggles of girlfriends on a tipsy, fizzy Friday night out (there were, you may recall, ~scenes~). But the movies themselves — weirdly sexless, soap-opera slow, self-serious mood rock — didn’t live up to this promise. New mad-weekend comedy Girls Trip, though, does: on Netflix it…

  • Galway Film Fleadh: A Ghost Story

    July 21, 2017 - By 

    The last film David Lowery wrote and directed, 2013’s Southern crime mood piece Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, caught some critical flak for its obvious debts to Terrence Malick’s whispery, wheat-swaying-in-the-sun photography. More than one review noted its promise, but emphasized Lowery’s need to find his own voice. Four years later, after a stint at Disney directing the live-action Pete’s Dragon, Lowery is back in the auteurish game, with a film seemingly designed to answer the charge of unoriginality. Even by A24’s idiosyncratic standards, A Ghost Story is a strange, alienating and singular piece of cinema. To give Lowery his due,…

  • Galway Film Fleadh: Maudie

    July 19, 2017 - By 

    The real-life tale of an arthritic misunderstood woman who finds meaning and recognition through art, Maudie could’ve have easily fallen victim to award-baiting faux-sensitivity. But much like the paintings produced by Nova Scotia artist Maud Lewis (1903–1970), now celebrated as one of Canada’s most famous folk artists, the biopic remains bright, simple, optimistic and a little childish. Dublin-born director Aisling Walsh (Song for a Raggy Boy, The Daisy Chain and numerous TV projects such as Dylan Thomas feature A Poet in New York) keeps a firm hand on Lesley Crewe’s script, which traces Lewis’ marriage, fame and eventual illness. Crewe,…

  • War for the Planet of the Apes

    July 17, 2017 - By 

    Like the cinematic equivalent of the ‘evolution of man’ graphic, each installment of the Planet of the Apes prequels has stood that bit taller than the last in terms of scope and ambition, as the franchise inches closer to the simian supremacy of Charlton Heston’s sixties space odyssey. 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes remains a stunning achievement in summer film-making, thanks to its expectation-defying mix of tragic fraternal conflict, lush botanic texture and a totally compelling hero. On Andy Serkis’ conflicted, motion-captured face was writ large the practical limits of Caesar’s longed-for apetopia and its non-violent covenant.…

  • Galway Film Fleadh: The Big Sick

    July 14, 2017 - By 

    Pakistani-American comic Kumail Nanjiani and writer Emily V. Gordon, married co-hosts of popular podcast ‘The Indoor Kids’, have mined the dramatic beginning of their real-life relationship for the wonderfully large-hearted and funny The Big Sick. Directed by Michael Showalter (Wet Hot American Summer, They Came Together) and produced by Judd Apatow, it’s the big, crowd-pleasing romance of the summer and a welcome return to form for the Hollywood rom-com. Kumail (Silicon Valley) plays a less successful version of himself, a Chicago comic driving an Uber on the side and doing 5 minute bits at the local comedy club, angling, alongside his friends Bo Burnham and Aidy Bryant (Saturday Night Live), for…

  • Spider-Man: Homecoming

    July 14, 2017 - By 

    ‘The world’s changing’, announces Michael Keaton’s Vulture, Spider-Man: Homecoming’s feather-ruffed villain, ‘and we have to change with it’. Change is the name of the game for the web-slinger’s third modern cinematic run, following Tobey Maguire’s and, less successfully, Andrew Garfield’s time in the red and blue undies. Adrian Toomes (Keaton) is speaking as a resentful civilian caught up in the skyscraper debris of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a metal-scrapper by trade, forced to make a living scurrying in the damage left by Stark and co. (when his crew are pushed off their clean-up gig by the drily-titled, Stark-sponsored Department of Damage Control, it’s the…