• Still Alice

    March 11, 2015 - By 

    There is a deep sense of inevitability to Still Alice, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s Alzheimer’s drama based on Lisa Genova’s novel, a feeling that is only partly down to its heroine’s arc of incurable mental deterioration. Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is a clever and accomplished linguistic professor whose cosy professional and family life unravels when she is diagnosed with an on-set variation of the disease, one which takes effect with a cruel swiftness. Early on she loses her way in a conference speech, but as the rot accelerates she begins to forget names, appointments, memories and, in the film’s principal, on-the-nose irony, whole…

  • Screen/Play #2: Record Shop Retail in Empire Records and High Fidelity

    March 5, 2015 - By 

    For someone like me who has only ever had a passing interest in music-buying and hit puberty around Napster’s ascendance, the record shop as a location resided almost exclusively in the general cultural imagination as opposed to my regular routine. Inevitably my idea of what record shops and the people who work there were like came to align with the enthusiastic but elitist list-making devotion immortalised by Stephen Fears’ High Fidelity (2000), based on Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel, and brought to life by John Cusack’s world-weary shop owner Rob Gordon and his pair of ‘musical idiots’, played perfectly by Jack…

  • Screen/Play #1: Tortured Artists in Whiplash and Frank

    February 12, 2015 - By 

    Damien Chazelle’s testosterone-pumping Whiplash, released last month, is a musical coming-of-age story with the form of a boxing movie; never more so than in a pivotal ‘training montage’ in which the young hero, the talented but arrogant jazz drummer Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller), works to regain his lost first-stringer position. In a move obviously designed to provoke the music student, band conductor Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), who rules his classroom with equal parts terror and humiliation, has replaced the ambitious Andrew with a drummer of lesser ability. Andrew channels his frustration and rage into a gruelling, cymbal-smashing practice session, applying…

  • Whiplash

    January 21, 2015 - By 

    True to its title, Whiplash hits like a double decker. I left the screening of writer-director Damien Gazelle’s astonishingly hot-blooded second feature dizzy and elated. Andrew Neiman (Miles Tenner) is a young, ambitious jazz drummer attending the fictional Schaffer Conservatory, the most prestigious music academy in the United States, and suffering from an acute case of what we might call ‘undergrad hubris’. Desperate to impress, he falls under the tutelage of the school’s alpha dog, Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons), a merciless instructor who demands excellence of his pupils and enforces standards through a robust programme of terror and humiliation. Whiplash arrives on the…

  • Taken 3

    January 9, 2015 - By 

    Producer/writer Luc Besson and director Olivier Megaton are filmmakers with a very specific set of skills, ones they have acquired over very long careers, and ones they apply liberally to Taken 3, Liam Neeson’s third round of familial brouhaha as Bryan Mills, retired spook and walking diplomatic incident. They can take the plainest of scenes, like two people in a room talking, or a basic freeway car chase, and turn them into impenetrable garbage. They can look at the reception to Taken 2, identify everything about it audiences disliked (the jumps in plot logic; the fun-sucking attention on Maggie Grace’s gormless suffering daughter routine; the softened…

  • The Theory of Everything

    January 8, 2015 - By 

    There are mercifully few equation montages in Theory of Everything, the hazy, heartfelt biopic of celebrity English astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. There is a scene early on where Stephen (Eddie Redmayne), an spiritedly disorganised graduate student searching out a thesis topic at 1960s Cambridge, seeks inspiration by scribbling out theorems on a blackboard, with a hugging, affectionate camera angle and an upbeat piano score. Even then, what strikes clearest is the jittery chalk transcription, a warning of the doom to come. It is one of the film’s few concessions to the tropes of the ‘damaged genius’ biopic: elsewhere, an enthused physics student explains black hole theory…

  • Paddington

    December 4, 2014 - By 

    Like its eponymous Peruvian exile, the cinematic adaptation of Michael Bond’s iconic children’s book series arrives under choppy circumstances. A late-in-the-game change of lead voice talent (from Colin Firth to Ben Whishaw) and a flat teaser trailer were casting doubts on the viability of StudioCanal’s most expensive film to date. They need not have worried: like its marmalade-guzzling, duffle-clad hero, Paddington is a sweet, immensely likable creation that is sure to find a hearty welcome on adopted shores. Writer-director Paul King and co-plotter Hamish McColl have delivered a lovey, lovely live action/animation film which doubles as a great Christmas watch.…

  • Life Itself

    November 26, 2014 - By 

    The owlish, circular Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert famously championed 1994’s Hoop Dreams, an early documentary by Steve James looking at the aspirations of a group of black city kids, and with Life Itself James repays the favour. Lovers of film and film criticism will find much to appreciate in the film, which uses the memoir of the same name to tell Ebert’s story, from his beginnings in print journalism to his final days at home and at hospital, scenes James captures with intimate proximity. Life Itself is a candid and moving film about how to relate to art and…

  • Transition Cinema: Outburst 2014 Review

    November 24, 2014 - By 

    The film programme of the 8th annual Outburst Queer Arts Festival, screened at Belfast’s QFT, offered a showcase of some of the most interesting additions to international queer cinema. A running theme in this year’s films is that of identities in transition. Characters move from female to male, naive to mature, adolescent to adult, loser to big-shot, in to out. Sometimes they escape their current identities through bravery and curiosity; other times they are forced to by events out of their control. New identities and arrangements promise liberation and novelty, but navigating the changes brings unseen problems. Sometimes they make…

  • Smolder and Scully: The Fall Review

    November 18, 2014 - By 

    Your mum’s favourite serial killer is back. At the end of last year’s five-episode run of BBC2’s The Fall, Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) packed in his moonlighting strangling escapades and carted his family onto the next Stenna Line to the Highlands. But you can’t keep a good stalker down, especially when he’s one half of the BBC’s most locally successful and internationally exportable drama for years. In last week’s sophomore opener, he’s back to eyeing up brunettes on the Larne line. In the meantime, creator Allan Cubbit has had to defend the show against claims that it glamourizes female violence,…