• Unsane

    March 23, 2018 - By 

    Before last year’s criminally ignored The Florida Project, Sean Baker made headlines by shooting 2015 feature Tangerine on iPhone gear (the director used 3 different iPhone 5s). Indie authenticity suited the low-key story of pair of transgendered prostitutes on the Sunset Strip, capturing the forced street intimacy and, when tilted skywards, the expansive, beautifully festive colouring of one-crazy-night Los Angeles. Now Steven Soderbergh, no stranger to doing things his own way, has shot his new film Unsane with an iPhone rig (iPhone 7 Plus in 4K, with the app FiLMiC Pro). No doubt it helped keep some costs down — again, Soderbergh…

  • The Square

    March 20, 2018 - By 

    At the beginning of Palme d’Or-winning The Square, another cold, almost hypothermic portrait of male insincerity from Force Majeure’s Ruben Östlund, a successful Stockholm art curator is interviewed by a nervous journalist (Elizabeth Moss). With his fey scarf, bright but not unfashionable socks and red designer spectacles, tactically removed to communicate casualness, Christian, played by Claes Bang, is every inch the dreamy modern intellectual. When Moss’ interviewer asks him to unpack the dense description of one of the museum’s events, an investigation of the ‘topos’ of the exhibition space, he struggles, offering a glib line about the validity of normal objects becoming…

  • Tomb Raider

    March 16, 2018 - By 

    Friends is on Netflix, Steps are selling out arenas, and Tomb Raider is back. Lara Croft, that odd 90’s relic of semi-mortification pixelised banter, has been rebooted for a Millenial sensibility, Alicia Vikander slipping on the tanktop Angelina Jolie had two goes at in the early 00’s films. And director Roar Uthaug (The Wave) and screenwriters Alastair Siddons and Geneva Robertson-Dworet play it safe, too safe in the end. First-time writer Robertson-Dworet is down for future female-driven Marvel projects Captain Marvel and Silver & Black, and she and Siddons construct their Lara revival like a superhero origin story. Dead parents,…

  • You Were Never Really Here

    March 15, 2018 - By 

    If ever there was a filmmaker that could be referred to as uncompromising and exuding integrity, then Lynne Ramsey (We Need To Talk About Kevin) is certainly up there with the best of them. After The Lovely Bones was snatched away by Peter Jackson in 2009 and Jane Got A Gun resulted in her walking off the set due to producer interference, Ramsey’s steadfastness has paid off with this stunning trip of a film, that has the great Joaquin Phoenix in an awesomely committed role. One that may be his greatest yet. Joe (Phoenix) is a mentally scarred US military veteran,…

  • Dublin Film Fest: The Breadwinner

    March 6, 2018 - By 

    Cartoon Saloon make stories about the value of making stories. In the first solo feature from the Kilkenny animation studio, The Secret of Kells (2009), the stories are those of myth and faith ferried by the Book of Kells, diligently reproduced by illuminators under siege from Nordic barbarians. In Song of the Sea (2014), the narratives are personal, a coastal family working through the loss of a wife and mother, using musical notes as form of memory preservation. Saloon’s third feature, The Breadwinner, due for release this May, blends the private and the public, shifting out of the studio’s Celtic…

  • Red Sparrow

    March 6, 2018 - By 

    Based upon the book of the same name by ex-CIA agent Jason Matthews, Red Sparrow is a modern-day spy thriller by director Francis Lawrence (Hunger Games: Catching Fire, I Am Legend) that harks back to the days of the cold war thrillers of the 70s/80s but fails to update it appropriately, coming across as a piece of vitriolic propaganda and little else. Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone) and the rest of the top-notch cast try their damndest to give it some credibility but the story and premise make for a predictably silly and gratuitous affair on many levels. Dominika Egorova (Lawrence)…

  • Dublin Film Fest: Pre-Crime

    March 2, 2018 - By 

    Artificial intelligence, drones and self-driving cars have moved from science fiction stories into the real world. In The Minority Report, Philip K. Dick imagined a cop who used the pre-cognitive abilities of mutant siblings to solve serious crimes before they happened. Real cops predict crime too, except they turn to big data for help. Showing at the Dublin International Film Festival, Pre-Crime examines how police departments and private businesses use public and private information to work out who is likely to carry out illegal acts. The idea of proactive policing to stop crime isn’t new, but it has been transformed…

  • Dublin Film Fest: Marlina The Murderer in Four Acts

    March 1, 2018 - By 

    Lance Daly’s Black 47 opened the Dublin Film Festival with a revenge Western filtered through Irish historical grievance, bearded men with rifles chasing eachother across Connault mud and muck. Written and directed by Mouly Surya, Marlina The Murderer in Four Acts offers a kind of feminist counterweight, an Indonesian Western which appropriates classical genre scaffolding for a regionally specific tale of female rage and empowerment. The whiplash lettering and blaring brass notes from the school of Morricone introduce us to Part 1, “The Robbery” (the others are “The Journey”, “The Confession” and “The Birth”). Marlina (Marsha Timothy) lives in the…

  • Dublin Film Fest: Tower. A Bright Day

    February 28, 2018 - By 

    The ‘tower’ of the title, or ‘wieza’ in the original Polish of Jagoda Szelc’s debut feature Tower. A New Day, is represented by Mula (Anna Krotoska), a tightly wound, defensive mother and wife who lives in the countryside with her family. She has the pressure of looking after her sick mother, who exists in a borderline comatose state in a spare room, and her young niece Nina (Laila Hennessy), abandoned by her birth mother and raised by Mula as her own. On the eve of Nina’s First Holy Communion, the family is visited by her biological mother, Mula’s sister Kaja…

  • Dublin Film Fest: Good Favour

    February 28, 2018 - By 

    The big, bad Germanic woods spits out a wounded orphan in the opening of Rebecca Daly’s Good Favour, whose fairy tale clarity gives way to a woozy, slippery blend of crisp devotional realism and fanatical flights of fancy. The Irish director’s third feature, co-written with Glenn Montgomery, is a subtle, sturdily controlled parable about the power of shared myths, comparable to Robert Eggers’ The Witch if not in genre then in recreational detail and reality-breaking seriousness. Tom (Vincent Romeo) is the malnourished, skinny young man from the Black Forest, who stumbles on small markers of settlement: a hatchback truck, an empty classroom, a cabin…