• Land of Mine

    August 11, 2017 - By 

    World War 2 films could be seen to have been at saturation point for quite some time but writer/director Martin Zandvliet’s (The Model) new drama Land Of Mine proves that there is still plenty of mileage in the genre, with a tale that sheds light on a very controversial time period in Denmark’s history, while also dealing with age old themes of revenge and forgiveness with stark authenticity. Set just after WW2, Land Of Mine tells the story of a group of surrendered German soldiers, all of whom are young boys from the Hitler Youth, who are ordered to demine the…

  • Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

    August 4, 2017 - By 

    Modern blockbuster film-making is calling out for a new The Fifth Element, but Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets isn’t it. Two decades after Luc Besson’s classically garish retro-future space opera, he’s returned to the same aesthetic; it’s another summer film based on a comic book, sure, but not what you would expect. Valerian is based on the French comic series Valérian and Laureline, written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières, which began its run in the pre-Star Wars sixties. Besson, a long-time fan of the series, obviously drew on it for 1997’s weirdo favourite, and…

  • Hounds of Love

    August 2, 2017 - By 

    For his debut feature, Australian film-maker Ben Young returns to his Perth roots, subjecting his hometown to a predator’s gaze. Psychological abduction thriller Hounds of Love opens with a pervs-eye view of teenage girls playing netball, the slow-motion camera tracking bodily curves and the wafting of skirts while a couple watch from their car, and then offer one of the unfortunate girls a lift home. Later in the film, as the depravity of the married kidnappers becomes clearer, a tracking shot line-up of unassuming detached houses frames the buildings as hostile sites, the carefree, slow-mo routines of family life now…

  • Captain Underpants

    July 31, 2017 - By 

    Unsurprising news: Captain Underpants is a silly movie. Surprising news: it’s also not bad. Based on Dav Pilkey’s popular children’s novels of the same name and directed by David Soren (Turbo), DreamWorks’ Captain Underpants pretty much comes as advertised: it’s about a big, dumb guy in Y-fronts and a cape. Like the book series, the Underpants movie centres on two fourth-grade best friends and neighbours, George Beard (Kevin Hart) and Harold Hutchkins (Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch), and their efforts to inject a bit of life into their grim middle school existence, under the authoritarian grip of principal Mr. Krupp (Ed…

  • Girls Trip

    July 28, 2017 - By 

    Some movies are made for audiences. Not in a buck-passing ‘we made it for the fans, not the critics’ way that follows deserved Tomatometer mauling. It’s rather that in certain contexts, a movie’s qualities can be amplified, and its flaws made to seem less important. The Fifty Shades movies, for example, were marketed as ‘events’, a go-to destination for gaggles of girlfriends on a tipsy, fizzy Friday night out (there were, you may recall, ~scenes~). But the movies themselves — weirdly sexless, soap-opera slow, self-serious mood rock — didn’t live up to this promise. New mad-weekend comedy Girls Trip, though, does: on Netflix it…

  • Dunkirk

    July 20, 2017 - By 

    Dunkirk, one of the summer’s most hyped and star-strewn aspiring blockbusters, is about that iconic crossroads moment of the early Second World War: the attempted evacuation in 1940 of nearly half a million British, French and Belgian soldiers from the titular French beach. Cut off from air support, surrounded by the German army, bombed to breaking point by the Luftwaffe – and with the safe haven of Dover less than thirty miles away – the Allies face catastrophe. A desperate evacuation strategy is mounted over land, sea and air that enlists not only the Allied forces but also British civilians…

  • Galway Film Fleadh: Maudie

    July 19, 2017 - By 

    The real-life tale of an arthritic misunderstood woman who finds meaning and recognition through art, Maudie could’ve have easily fallen victim to award-baiting faux-sensitivity. But much like the paintings produced by Nova Scotia artist Maud Lewis (1903–1970), now celebrated as one of Canada’s most famous folk artists, the biopic remains bright, simple, optimistic and a little childish. Dublin-born director Aisling Walsh (Song for a Raggy Boy, The Daisy Chain and numerous TV projects such as Dylan Thomas feature A Poet in New York) keeps a firm hand on Lesley Crewe’s script, which traces Lewis’ marriage, fame and eventual illness. Crewe,…

  • The Graduate

    July 18, 2017 - By 

    Fifty years have passed since the original release of The Graduate, the film that launched Dustin Hoffman as a star, innovated the pop music movie soundtrack and confirmed Mike Nichols’ genius with 1967’s Best Director Oscar. The highest grossing film at the U.S. box office that year, its success helped to usher in a new wave of young Hollywood filmmakers and the most creative decade in American cinema history followed during the 1970s. While the film’s historical cinematic significance is without dispute, The Graduate remains a thoroughly modern film – in both its themes and style – that demands to…

  • Galway Film Fleadh: The Big Sick

    July 14, 2017 - By 

    Pakistani-American comic Kumail Nanjiani and writer Emily V. Gordon, married co-hosts of popular podcast ‘The Indoor Kids’, have mined the dramatic beginning of their real-life relationship for the wonderfully large-hearted and funny The Big Sick. Directed by Michael Showalter (Wet Hot American Summer, They Came Together) and produced by Judd Apatow, it’s the big, crowd-pleasing romance of the summer and a welcome return to form for the Hollywood rom-com. Kumail (Silicon Valley) plays a less successful version of himself, a Chicago comic driving an Uber on the side and doing 5 minute bits at the local comedy club, angling, alongside his friends Bo Burnham and Aidy Bryant (Saturday Night Live), for…

  • Spider-Man: Homecoming

    July 14, 2017 - By 

    ‘The world’s changing’, announces Michael Keaton’s Vulture, Spider-Man: Homecoming’s feather-ruffed villain, ‘and we have to change with it’. Change is the name of the game for the web-slinger’s third modern cinematic run, following Tobey Maguire’s and, less successfully, Andrew Garfield’s time in the red and blue undies. Adrian Toomes (Keaton) is speaking as a resentful civilian caught up in the skyscraper debris of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a metal-scrapper by trade, forced to make a living scurrying in the damage left by Stark and co. (when his crew are pushed off their clean-up gig by the drily-titled, Stark-sponsored Department of Damage Control, it’s the…