• BFF17: Catfight

    April 11, 2017 - By 

    Rage, maternal loss and the sting of humiliation are accelerants in the bloodstream in Catfight, Onur Tukel’s face-thumping black comedy and satire on the unreality of violence. The match is lit when estranged college chums Veronica (Grey’s Anatomy‘s Sandra Oh) and Ashley (Anne Heche) bump into eachother at a fancy Manhattan party for the first time in years. In this alternate America (very near future?), the country is eyeing up another war in the Middle East, and Veronica and her husband, who runs a debris clean-up company, are in for a big payday if they land a juicy Pentagon contact.…

  • BFF17: All This Panic

    April 6, 2017 - By 

    Last year the Belfast Film Festival opened with Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang, a modern Turkish fairytale about a group of sisters dealing with the challenges of puberty in a small, conservative seaside village. This time around, up the road from the buzz of the Julian Barratt’s delirious Mindhorn, opening night gave us another intimately observed film about a coterie of young girls on the cusp of adulthood. The subjects of All This Panic, directed and shot by Jenny Gage and her cinematographer partner Thomas Betterton, are not subject to the same level of lock-and-key control and captivity, the six girls…

  • Elle

    April 3, 2017 - By 

    It’s not very often that a film has me strangely anticipating which social taboo is going to be launched out of the window with amazing indifference next. Yet Elle manages to achieve this with an astoundingly entertaining edge that verges on the absurd when it’s not shocking you with its core theme of sexual assault. But all of this is unsurprising when you know that Elle is made by notorious Dutch director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop), who is at his controversial and stylistically provocative best, and stars the great Isabelle Huppert, a fearless, steely and ridiculously talented actress at the top…

  • BFF17: Mad To Be Normal

    April 3, 2017 - By 

    There is a scene in Robert Mullan’s Mad To Be Normal, a biopic of the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing (played by David Tennant), in which the controversial figure is being interviewed on American radio during one of his promotional cross-Atlantic trips. While the room’s young, rapt audience look on, the broadcaster introduces Laing with a string of hyperbolic accolades, calling him an “acid Marxist” and, outrageously, a “white Martin Luther King”, whose revolutionary approach to treatment has enamoured the 60s counter-cultural spirit, and guaranteed him a spot on every dorm room bookcase in the United States. Eager for a…

  • The Boss Baby

    March 28, 2017 - By 

    It’s a movie about a baby. Who wears a suit. Like a boss does. I’m not sure what else to tell you. Based on the children’s picture-book by Marla Frazee and directed by Madagascar regular Tom McGrath, Dreamworks’ The Boss Baby takes a universal truth about the demanding reality of newborns, and spins it into a whimsical theory about the origins of toddlers and the conflicting demands put on a family’s resources. Voiced by Miles Bakshi (and Tobey Maguire in the adult-looking-back voiceovers), Tim is a 7 year-old enjoying life as the sole recipient of his parents’ time and attention, mom and…

  • CHiPs

    March 27, 2017 - By 

    Based on the 1977-1983 television series of the same name, CHiPs is an action-comedy remake strangely obsessed with the question of what can and cannot be considered homophobic. Frank ‘Ponch’ Poncherello (Michael Peña) is an FBI agent who goes undercover in the California Highway Patrol to uncover some dirty cops. On the morning of his first day, changing in the locker room, he bristles when his new partner Jon Baker (Dax Shepard), clad only in tightie whities, reaches for a hug. Ponch quickly explains he’s not homophobic or anything, it’s just a weird thing to do with a stranger. Cut to…

  • Beauty and the Beast

    March 21, 2017 - By 

    One of the reasons fairy tales work is that they are so obviously not real. Their fantastical, exaggerated qualities help make the horror, weirdness and romantic impossibilities easier to process. And while it wasn’t exactly frightening, Disney’s iconic animated musical Beauty and the Beast, part of the late-80s/early 90s “Disney Renaissance”, had an understanding of how to build Gothic contrast, moreso than even the 18th-century French original, in which the Beast is not Beauty’s jailor but her doting servant. There was a strangeness to Beauty and the Beast‘s obviously warped story; not just the Stockholm Syndrome infatuation, or the intense…

  • Personal Shopper

    March 20, 2017 - By 

    If you are looking for a ghost story with a difference, then writer/director Olivier Assayas’ (Carlos) latest genre-bender Personal Shopper may be just what you are after. The film initially plods along, with Kristen Stewart (Twilight) leading in an odd combination of a haunted house type story and an insight into the world of Parisian socialites and celebrities. But what gives Personal Shopper an edge is how the movie morphs into a gripping suspense/thriller in its latter half, managing to creep me out more than any other horror that I’ve seen in quite some time. Quite the feat! Maureen (Stewart)…

  • Kong: Skull Island

    March 20, 2017 - By 

    Like John Goodman’s black ops adventurer whose mania for fantastic beasts and where to find them drives the film, Warner Bros are chasing something big with Kong: Skull Island. Coming with an Avengers Initiative-style post-credit coda and forming a “Monsterverse” (sigh) with Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla, this new Kong rendition is a reach for a big, stonking franchise to compete with other studios’ similar endeavours. Peter Jackson’s 2005 King Kong leant into the tragic, emotionally grand tradition of old-timey, New York skyline iconography. Whatever you make of Jackson’s film – and reception was mixed – an eager artistic vision shone through. Skull…

  • Logan

    March 9, 2017 - By 

    Finally! Writer/director James Mangold (Walk The Line) has made up for the damp squib that was 2013’s The Wolverine, with a fantastic final outing for Hugh Jackman that transcends the usual superhero formula and delves into a much darker, violent and more vulnerable, nearly dystopian world. Unlike the many other movies of this genre, Logan gives the viewer a feeling of realism, substance and heart, of the type that has never been seen in the rest of the Marvel or DC worlds, making for an instant classic. In the year 2029, mutants are all but a thing of the past,…