• Entourage

    Entourage isn’t really a movie. It’s a feature-length wrap-up of the massively successful HBO show of the same name, which told the story of a group of bromantic friends from Queens who live the high life in la-la-land when the beautiful one gets tapped for stardom. Loosely based on the banter of producer Mark Wahlberg and his buddies, the show combined a lightly-worn underdog spirit with glossy lifestyle porn. The film is, as everyone has pointed out, basically a bunch of TV episodes strung together, a fist-bumping victory lap for the already-smug. In basic story-telling terms, nothing really happens: there’s no arc, no development, no…

  • Jurassic World

    No recent blockbuster is so visibly animated by the anxiety of influence as Jurassic World. Coming 14 years after the last inter-species tête-à-tête, and nearly a quarter of a century after the magisterial original, Spielberg’s franchise has been dug out of amber and reanimated for a new generation. Now three sequels in, Jurassic World gestures to its cinematic parent with a half-embarrassed mixture of deference and dread, prodding audience nostalgia with riffs on iconic images while offering a surprisingly self-reflexive commentary on its own bland, sell-out pillaging of that first-time wonder. Two decades after the park’s initial teething problems, the…

  • Listen Up Philip

    The saying goes that if you think everyone you meet is an asshole, then the real asshole is probably you. Alex Ross Perry’s brilliant, caustic Listen Up Philip serves up two of recent cinema’s finest assholes, a men of letters two-hander of Jason Schwartzman’s young novelist and Jonathan Pryce as the past-it literary icon he so admires. Schwartzman has a habit of playing characters on the fringes of sufferability, from Funny People‘s sell-out comic to the word-smart P.I in Bored to Death, and here he pushes through to the other side, into a glorious, all-out prickishess. Philip (Schwartzman) is preparing for the launch of his second…

  • San Andreas

    California is shaking and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is the only man who can save his wife and hot daughter from those antsy tectonic plates. Boys and girls, let’s play the disaster movie drinking game. Take a shot every time someone asks ‘are you okay?’ to someone who really should not be okay; every time the super dad tells the camera he’s gonna ‘get his daughter’; every time someone says ‘little [X] is all grown up’; every close-up of a scary red graph; every time someone busts into an office and says ‘you have to see this’; every time someone…

  • Tomorrowland

    Brad Bird’s so-far stellar directorial efforts have shown an ability to draw on older forms and attitudes and render them with a fresh, impressive sense of movement and action. Humanist classic The Iron Giant’s story of small-town Americana resisting cold war hysteria was a hand-drawn animation released as the industry barreled towards computer generation. Later, The Incredibles told a superhero family drama in the style of old-glamour spy movies, laced with a critique of the modern world’s low horizons. Tomorrowland, channeling the futurist enthusiasm of Uncle Walt’s original theme park ride, is steeped in the golly-gee wonder of Bird’s Space Age youth, with its jetpacks and rocket ships…

  • Mad Max: Fury Road

    Stay on the road long enough and your brain starts to cook. It’s been thirty years since we last saw mad Mel’s petrolhead wanderer of the scorched Outback, but Fury Road shows no sign of the entropy or compromise that usually accompany extended hiatuses. The seventy year-old George Miller, who has spent the gap making talking animal films and gingerly trying to get a new Max off the ground, has delivered that rarity: a popcorn blockbuster fuelled by the daring clarity of personal, psychotic vision. With its blistering locomotive energy, Fury Road moves at a different warp-speed to blandly directed…

  • The Canal

    “Will you watch this film with me? I’m scared to watch it alone,” begs the grieving and quite possibly insane father at the centre of Dublin-set The Canal. Film watching is a risky business in Irish film-maker Ivan Kavanagh’s broadly familiar but effective combination of domestic dread, malignant spirits and dysfunctional paterfamilias. We open on a slice of yuppie fantasy, with film archivist David (Rupert Evans) and his beautiful pregnant wife Alice (Hannah Hoekstra) meeting an estate agent and cheerfully joyfully agreeing on a lovely townhouse for their burgeoning family unit, a buzzing middle-class aspiration that goes sour. Horror continues…

  • I Am Belfast

    The movies were like magic carpets, Mark Cousins tells us about his younger days, introducing Festival opener I Am Belfast at the Moviehouse Dublin Road. The film itself is a kind of magic carpet ride through the city, with Cousins as the excitable genie, showing us not a whole new world, but the same one, viewed from unexpected angles. Belfast, tilted. We begin in the clouds, coming down on the city from above, Cousins bringing his film-making eye to his hometown after a career spent Out There. Cut to a stained mountain face, raw and prehistoric, its reflection stretching outward in a pool…

  • 10 Picks for Belfast Film Festival

    Kicking off this evening with Mark Cousins’ I Am Belfast, and running from April 16 to April 25, this year’s Belfast Film Festival boasts a programme traversing ever genre and sub-genre of modern and classic cinema. With screenings and one-off events taking place in venues large, small and altogether curious across the city, there is (as their full programme attests) quite literally something for everyone on offer. In fact, so dense is the schedule that we’ve enlisted the immeasurably tasteful Conor Smyth to whittle it down to ten of their most unmissable screenings and events. Delve in. I Am Belfast  The question…

  • Screen/Play #3: Once, Begin Again and the Authenticity Problem

    In Irish writer-director John Carney’s musical comedy-drama Begin Again, released last year, troubled New York music executive Dan (Mark Ruffalo) sees young songwriter Gretta (Keira Knightley) perform at a downtown open mike session and, smitten with her music, gives her his card. He promises that with a bit of production pizazz and a half-decent video (maybe a Norah Jones vibe) she could have a real radio hit. Gretta rejects his commercialising instinct. She just wants to be real – let the songs speak for themselves and all that. The haggard but good-hearted Dan finds her idealism endearing and naive. ‘Name…