• Gone Girl

    October 6, 2014 - By 

    Who knew extreme marital dysfunction could be such a riot? Adapted by Gillian Flynn from her best-selling novel, Gone Girl is a lurid and sickly funny evisceration of modern marriage. Flynn efficiently translates the book’s twisted psychologies and David Fincher, with his regular photography team and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ downbeat score, anchors the violent camp in his cold suburban surfaces. The film has the studied dread of Patricia Highsmith and the page-turning brio of a schlocky airport novel, and is a wicked satire on the ‘missing girl’ media phenomenon. It is also the first must-see studio film of the autumn. On…

  • 20000 Days on Earth

    September 22, 2014 - By 

    It’s important to understand that we all have our own biases. So before I discuss the new documentary 20000 Days On Earth, I feel it is important to establish that I’m a firm believer in Nick Cave and the strange, almost Lovecraftian shape his career has taken. From the apocalyptic noise of Birthday Party to last years pretty excellent  Bad Seed’s release Push The Sky Away and all of the films and novels in between, Cave has taken a journey filled with drugs, violence and religion which is just screaming to be explored cinematically. Anything that can give me more…

  • Pride

    September 22, 2014 - By 

    Pride works – and it really works – because it finds a way to perfectly be the kind of film you think it’s going to be while also offering surprising shades of feeling. The story of a real-life alliance between striking miners and gay and lesbian activists in Thatcherite Britain has a colourful, slightly cartoonish anti-Establishment bounce in its step, familiar from other British heart-warmers like Billy Elliot and The Boat That Rocked (with whom it shares Bill Nighy). But writer Stephen Beresford and Matthew Warchus are generous and compassionate in their treatment of characters and their dignity, producing a celebration of working-class solidarity and friendship…

  • Noble

    September 19, 2014 - By 

    Noble, the biopic of Irish humanitarian Christina Noble starring comedian Deidre O’Kane, feels a lot like a TV movie. First there’s the on-the-nose title, which reminds me of those movies you sometimes see on satellite channels, the ones that rip off blockbuster plots and give them over-literal titles like Space Danger or Future Saviour. The film may as well be called Saint Christina or The Pluck of the Irish. And second, there’s the intensely by-the-numbers approach it takes to Noble’s life story, as cribbed from memoirs like Bridge Across My Sorrows and Mama Tina. The film shifts chronologically between two stories: the ‘mis-lit’ material of her growing up in post-war Dublin squalor and ‘present day’…

  • Not I, Footfalls & Rockaby @ The Mac

    September 10, 2014 - By 

    In theatrical terms, Lisa Dwan’s trilogy of playwright Samuel Beckett’s celebrated short plays at The MAC represented a significant first, and in all likelihood, a last. The actress’s stated intention to retire from performing ‘Not I’ by the end of 2015 means that these handful of Belfast shows had an added spice. It’s hardly surprising that Dwan can see the finishing line for her role as Mouth, as the emotional, technical and psychological demands must surely exact a price. Head strapped to a board, eyes and ears covered, arms immobilized, enveloped in total darkness – this is sensory deprivation taken…

  • The Guest

    September 8, 2014 - By 

    Interrupting the end-of-summer plainness like an ice bucket over the head is The Guest, a fun, nasty little slice of nuclear family devastation. It’s a tight, black domestic thriller from the seasoned horror partnership of Adam Winberg and Simon Barrett. Like the duo’s previous film, the rudimentary but spirited slasher You’re Next, it’s a genre piece about home invasion and family dysfunction. Here the threat isn’t a gang of animal-mask mercenaries, but a wolf in ship’s clothing. If the sheep shopped at Abercrombie and Finch. The Peterson family, still reeling from the death of son/brother Caleb in the Afghanistan conflict,…

  • What If

    September 2, 2014 - By 

    Hogwarts expatriate Daniel Radcliffe is the headliner here, but you might also recognise Zoe Kazan, one half of the meet-cute not-couple in Canadian-Irish production What If (retitled from The F-Word). She wrote Ruby Sparks (2009), a fun and acerbic satire of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope (an increasingly problematic term) in which she was the dreamt-up effervescent love interest for Paul Dano’s brooding, needy novelist. It is something of a pity, then, to see her taking on much more unchallenging genre material here. Adapted from T. J. Dawe and Michael Rinaldi’s Canadian play Toothpaste and Cigars, and directed by Michael Dowse (who did the winning The…

  • All This Mayhem

    August 28, 2014 - By 

    Nineties America saw a wider embrace of skateboarding by mainstream culture and exciting innovations in vertical ramp (‘vert’) skating technique, developments that were captured by the expanded availability of affordable video recording and playing equipment. New skaters and tricks were documented and distributed via series’ of home-edited compilation videos with colourful titles like Super Conductor, Super Collider (1993), Welcome to Hell (1996) or Tim and Henry’s Pack of Lies (1992). Skateboarding’s instinctive habit for showing off means that any documentarian of the sport has ample footage to furnish their narratives. In All This Mayhem, director Eddie Martin mines homemade and…

  • Lucy

    August 27, 2014 - By 

    After honey-voiced hardware in Her, a blank-faced alien stalker in Under Her Skin and a lycra-skinned super spy in Captain America: Winter Soldier, Scarlett Johansson continues her trend of playing characters who are Not Like Us. In Lucy she is the titular miniskirt-hugging party girl, who gets kidnapped by scowling Koreans and ingests a super-drug that transforms her into a reality-bending superwoman. It’s also another in a long line of unconventional and unstable heroines from Parisian writer-director Buc Lesson, who gained success with the memorably offbeat action of Nikita, Leon: The Professional and The Fifth Element, as well as spearheading the Liam Neeson renaissance with the gruff, workmanlike Taken series. Lucy is a jumbled…

  • The Congress

    August 25, 2014 - By 

    As cut-throat a business as Hollywood may be, it’s inevitably a comedown from the horrible intensities of life in a warzone. The visually diverting but meandering The Congress is Ari Folman’s follow-up to 2009’s celebrated Waltz With Bashir, an animated documentary about former soldier Folman’s experiences during the 1982 Israel-Lebanon conflict. The Congress, inspired by Solaris author Stanislaw Lem’s 1971 science fiction novel The Futurological Congress, is an animated/live action blend which riffs on the movie industry’s superficial youth culture and delivers familiar dystopic warnings about society’s obsession with fantastical inoculations against the grim truths of real life. Robin Wright…