• The Thin Air Lockdown Movie Lock-In: 100 Films of Solitude (Week 2)

    April 9, 2020 - By 

    Now trapped in the house, some of us have suddenly been granted that elusive free time that had previously prevented us from digging into that renowned auteur’s back catalogue, or watching that film that everyone you know was recommending you see, but you didn’t because of some stubborn, rebellious impulse. And yet, in spite of the fact that the mythical free time tree has now been proven real, we still find ourselves in the virtual equivalent of shuffling around Xtra-vision, browsing through the same half-dozen shelves of films, absolutely refusing to make a decision. Here’s your weekly nudge in the right…

  • Parasite

    February 7, 2020 - By 

    In the dystopic locomotion of 2013’s Snowpiercer, Bong Joon Ho charted social hierarchy along the X axis. His new film, the Palme d’Or-netting Parasite, swaps horizontal for vertical, delivering a nasty update of the upstairs/downstairs formula for the South Korean service economy. It starts, quite literally, underground. A teenage brother and sister sprinting through the Kim family’s basement flat in a panic, trailing phones along the ceiling to snag a stray thread of WiFi. Their ground-level window offers a view of shoes and trouser bottoms, the alley’s pissed and pissing. The smog of city fumigators seeps in, fogging the domicile like…

  • Little Women

    January 3, 2020 - By 

    Grab the green bin. Greta Gerwig’s dropped in one last gift. Little Women, the seventh cinematic (re)telling of Louisa May Alcott’s much-loved novel, is a perfect film for the dark, weird, listless days that trot along right behind Christmas. It’s Gerwig’s third directorial effort, and the second time she’s written and directed, after the slow-burn brilliance of 2017’s Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan’s best movie). The ensemble domestic drama follows the troubles and triumphs of the March’s, a contented but economically limited household in Civil War-era Massachusetts, as four sisters and their mother await their pastor patriarch’s return from the conflict,…

  • Le Mans ’66 (Ford v Ferrari)

    November 29, 2019 - By 

    Is this film a Ford, or a Ferrari? Le Mans ‘66 (titled Ford v Ferrari in other territories) is pretty clear about which one it would like to be. Ford is ugly; Ferrari is beautiful. Ford spits its cars out with production-line urgency, in drab plants overseen by Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts), a wounded capitalist nursing second-generation anxiety, whose generous girth symbolises his enterprise’s quantitative bloat. Ferrari’s vehicles, on the other hand, are products of artisanal care and Mediterranean exuberance. Ford is efficiency; Ferrari is eros.  James Mangold’s film sides with the dreamers. It opens with a quasi-mystical voiceover…

  • The Peanut Butter Falcon

    October 25, 2019 - By 

    “Yeah you’re gonna die, it’s a matter of time. That ain’t the question; question is if they have good stories to tell about you when you’re gone,” opines Tyler (Shia LaBeouf). The hot-headed, low-rung outlaw on the run (he torched a rival crab trawler’s gear), is giving life lessons to his accidental travelling companion, Zak (Zack Gottsagen), a 22 year-old with Down’s Syndrome making his own escape. The Peanut Butter Falcon, the first feature from American writers and directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz, is an open-hearted yarn about good stories and good times, a rough-it-out best-pals adventure that moves with leisurely charm. Tyler is Zak’s guide, road buddy and…

  • The Goldfinch

    September 27, 2019 - By 

    “I don’t need to tell you about loss”, Nicole Kidman’s grieving mother tells the grown-up Theodore (Ansel Elgort), her one-time foster guest when his mother was killed in a bombing. But actually, she does — she, or someone — anyone — needs to tell us something interesting about it, because no-one else is making the effort. Adapted from Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2013 novel by screenwriter Peter Stroughan and director John Crowley, The Goldfinch is a wounded bird in a box office tailspin, and you can see why. It is a silly, bitty and a little embarrassing, too desperate to be “about” things, too unrelaxed to…

  • Bank Holiday Programming at Cinema Day 2019

    August 26, 2019 - By 

    Off for the bank hols but don’t fancy the North Coast? Film Hub NI have got you covered with Cinema Day, their fourth annual day-long celebration of film across Northern Irish locations. Kicking off in the morning with archived digital film (Newtownabbey), The Greatest Showman and Honey, I Shrunk The Kids (Belfast) and Big (Ballymena), the day will see a raft of free or low-cost programming inspired by the energy, longing and hostility of youth. For the young ones, there’s Jumangi, The Incredibles or The Iron Giant, while adults will get nostalgic kicks out of Heathers, The Commitments, Rebel Without a Cause and Stand By Me. More recent is Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, which…

  • The Lion King

    July 25, 2019 - By 

    Real life looks boring. Rocks look boring. Trees look boring. Fluffy animals look boring. No-one opens their curtains in the morning and thinks wow, look at all that! This is a problem for The Lion King, one that sinks Disney’s photo-realistic reproduction almost from the word go. Jon Favreau’s nearly beat-for-beat prideland retread (new scenes expand the 1994 original’s 88 minute runtime) is a weird, alienating exercise in uncanny cynicism: the transparent cash-grabbing motive is depressing, but not nearly as depressing as having to actually watch the thing, which ticks over with the shiny time-killing futility of a high-res screensaver.…

  • Docs Ireland: Town of Strangers & When All Is Ruin Once Again

    June 28, 2019 - By 

    A weird coincidence treated Docs Ireland attendees to a pair of documentaries set in and around Gort, a small Galway town near the Clare border. Treasa O’Brien’s Town of Strangers is the more immediately charming of the two, an assemblage of residents who find themselves, through birth, accident or chance, sharing the town. O’Brien herself is a casual presence in the film: she was in the town trying to cast non-actors for a scripted feature, but found herself drawn towards the energy and personality of the people who showed up at auditions, and decided to stick around, living out of her van.…

  • Docs Ireland: Gaza

    June 24, 2019 - By 

    Is it strange to surf during a siege? The optics of a modern-day siege, and the visual poetics associated with the Gaza Strip, get scrambled and re-infused in Andrew McConnell and Garry Keane’s Gaza, closing night film of the Docs Ireland festival. Born out of McConnell’s “Gaza Surf Club” photography project, the film is a rare postcard from a desperate shoreline. “There is a barrier separating the people of Gaza from life itself”, muses a theatre performer, who provides poetic commentary on the struggle of those living in the ravaged Mediterranean enclave. Habitually designated as the world’s largest open-air prison, the Strip…