• Fifty Shades Darker

    February 14, 2017 - By 

    More meta-event than movie, Fifty Shades Darker arrives with the forced fanfare of a willy cake from your Aunt Sheila. On page and screen, the series has struggled to provide material to match its breathless cultural ubiquity and this deficit continues with film number two. Is anyone actually enjoying this anymore? Local saucepot Jamie Dornan does the interview rounds like a good boy, but his screaming eyes betray the pain of bondage. Pipe up Jamie, what’s the safe word? Picking up a little time after Christian Grey (Dornan) and Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson, still the best thing here) severed their…

  • The Lego Batman Movie

    February 10, 2017 - By 

    Like a naughty teenager banished to his room, Master Bruce has been sulking in his man cave for some time now. A scowling cowling in SEAL Team 6 body armour, wrapped up in martyrdom angst, terrorising Gotham’s criminal class with the try-hard rasp of man who had too many whiskeys the night before, modern cinema’s vision of The World’s Greatest Detective seems a long distance from that introduced by Bob Kane and Bill Finger nearly 80 years ago. Still, the caped crusader’s infinite wardrobe is nothing if not versatile: Bruce Wayne is tailor-made for transformation. And boy is he due…

  • xXx: The Return of Xander Cage

    January 23, 2017 - By 

    Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, which starred, among others, Vin Diesel, opened with the hero of the film being put out by his enemies not knowing who he was. An inflated sense of ego. A similar feeling occurs while watching xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, directed by D.J. Caruso, except this time it’s the audience who are left wondering why should they know – or care – about the resurrection of a character who’s first cinematic outing was fifteen years ago. There were kids in my screening that weren’t even born fifteen years ago. The extreme sports angle of…

  • Manchester By The Sea

    January 17, 2017 - By 

    Kenneth Lonergan makes films about the things that don’t go away. In 2000’s You Can Count On Me, the sudden orphaning of young siblings helps fashion an unsolvable divide between the two in adult life, while in Margaret, which lingered undistributed for years while director and studio fought over the final cut, witnessing a fatal accident sends Anna Paquin’s carefree teenage life spiralling in new, frustrating directions. His third feature as writer-director, Manchester by the Sea, part of Amazon Studios’ effort to chase indie respectability, is Lonergan’s most refined work yet, a restrained but movingly complex portrait of tragedy’s never-ending…

  • Live By Night

    January 15, 2017 - By 

    Ben Affleck wants you to take him seriously. He’s sorry about the whole Gigli thing. He’s sorry about Daredevil. He’s done his penance and channelled his humiliation into a professional second act, growing a prestige beard and directing safe but highly competent book treatments. They even gave him an Oscar for one of them! When a film journo presented him with Batman v Superman‘s damning reviews and the internet glimpsed the emptiness behind the eyes, the implicit logic was that he was supposed to be above this shit. But even reliably workmanlike directors can make mistakes. Dennis Lehane’s writing has provided several film-makers…

  • Collateral Beauty

    December 21, 2016 - By 

    Like a sharp boot to the arse on your way out the door, David Frankel’s Collateral Beauty closes a miserable, baffling year with a miserable, baffling Christmas Carol, a clump of holiday treacle so toxic they should hand out hazmat suits with the tickets. Will Smith stars as Howard, one of those charismatic marketing guru types who misinterprets selling products as a noble creative calling. It’s been two years since the death of his daughter, and he hangs around the office in a solemn, silent funk, ignoring important company business and building elaborate domino displays, only to dramatically topple them…

  • Mom and Me

    August 24, 2016 - By 

    Laois-born Ken Wardrop has an Irishman’s fascination with mothers. His graduate film for Dun Laoghaire’s IADT, Undressing My Mother, was a frank and physically candid portrait of the Wardrop matriarch, glimpses of the widowed farmer’s wife’s bare flesh set to her ruminations on body, family and her late marriage. His first feature documentary, 2009’s His & Hers, profiled girls and women of all ages from the Irish Midlands, their testimonies tracing the arc of womanhood from teenage stress to last-call loneliness. For his latest doc, Mom and Me, Wardrop heads across the water to Oklahoma’s wide flats, bringing men into his frame for a look at Mama’s Boy Okies…

  • Chevalier

    July 22, 2016 - By 

    Dick size, both metaphorical and literal, is the subject of Greek auteur Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier, a pristine satire on machismo and the barely coded competition that animates how men relate to eachother. A group of six men, still looking spry in their thirties, forties and beyond, are vacationing on a luxury private yacht in the Aegean Sea, a get-together organised by the eldest and most assertively paternal among them, nicknamed The Doc (Yiorgos Kendros). As their sojourn draws to a close, they decide to play a game to determine which of them is ‘The Best in General’, an extended series of tests and random…

  • Maggie’s Plan

    July 20, 2016 - By 

    “So, is there a plan?” wonders a skeptical teen in the backseat of a cramped car on the school run. With these adults, it’s hard to know. Questions of intentions, schemes and the invisible hand of fate animate Rebecca Miller’s witty new comedy Maggie’s Plan, a charming three-hander with wonderful turns from Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore as inter-linked lovers whose hearts can’t seem to sit still. Gerwig dials down the quirk as the titular Maggie, a single New Yorker eager to take control of her life. She still delivers lines with that air of playful, slightly affected,…

  • The Conjuring 2

    June 21, 2016 - By 

    Contrary to totally-legit marketing stories about priests stationed at screenings, ready to deliver spiritual counsel to distressed moviegoers, The Conjuring 2 is not all that frightening. It is, however, probably the most entertaining big-studio horror movie of the past five years. Not because of the scares, but because of how relaxed it is around those scares. With two Insidious‘ and the first Conjuring under his belt, James Wan is confident enough not to just serve up the jump-scare hard sell that has become the default mode for multiplex horror. The film begins with a nice bait-and-switch: Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga reprising their…