• 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…

  • Dublin Film Fest: Black 47

    February 23, 2018 - By 

    The blackness is in the land, of course, the blight that’s reduced potatoes to asbestos, but, in Dublin Film Festival opener Black 47, it’s also in the hearts of the men who hold dominion over the land, and in the empire that produces them. Set in 1847, as crop failure and fever decimates the native Irish population, Lance Daly’s fourth feature reimagines the Great Irish Famine as a righteous revenge Western, a muddy, politically cynical chase thriller with shades of Rambo. James Frecheville stars as Michael Feeney, a Connacht man who returns home from overseas service in the British Army, to…

  • Fifty Shades Freed

    February 14, 2018 - By 

    Three Valentine’s Days later, it’s finally over. Jamie Dornan has been humiliated and audiences have been punished, but by this point you know what you’re in for. In order to get anything from Fifty Shades Freed, the climax to this improbable trilogy, you have to just hold up your hands and submit. Christian Grey gets his happy ending. The rest of us will have to get our rocks off elsewhere. Picking off where Darker left off, the soap opera romance is in full swing. There’s still the odd trip to the Red Room, sure, but Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) and Christian (Dornan)…

  • The 15.17 To Paris

    February 14, 2018 - By 

    On 21 August 2015, on a cross-border train from Amsterdam to Paris, a Moroccan man named Ayoub El Khazzan emerged from a toilet cubicle shirtless, an AKM assault rifle in his hands. He shot a passenger who tried to intervene and then went to open fire on the carriage, but the weapon jammed, allowing three young American men to rush El Khazzan and prevent further violence. Afterwards Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone, two of whom were off-duty members of the U.S. Armed Services, received the Legion of Honour, the highest decoration of the French Republic. Back home, Stone earned a…

  • Glory (Slava)

    February 12, 2018 - By 

    Glory (Slava) is a satire about the hypocrisies of power and class within contemporary Bulgarian society. Like the Russian-made watch of the title, this film has been constructed with purpose. The watch keeps time; the film tells a modern parable about a small act of thoughtlessness and its consequences. Solitary railway worker Tzanko (Stefan Denolyubov) comes across a mysterious pile of cash on train tracks. He reports his find to the authorities. Tzanko is honest but also isolated, disliked by his colleagues and shown little kindness by his peers. The Ministry of Transport’s head of public relations Julia Staykova (Margita Gosheva) regards…

  • Third Chance Saloon? Revisiting Kilkenny’s Oscar-Nominated Animations

    January 26, 2018 - By 

    Among the Irish nominations for the 90th Academy Awards, announced this week, was The Breadwinner, up for Best Animated Feature, from Kilkenny-based animation and design studio Cartoon Saloon. Based on Deborah Ellis’ novel, it follows a girl in late-90s Afghanistan whose father is unjustly arrested by the Taliban authorities, forcing her to pass as a boy in order to support her family. The film, which will receive its Irish premiere at the Dublin Film Festival next month and a wide release later in the Spring, is the company’s highest profile feature yet. In terms of Oscar nods, that makes it three out…

  • Phantom Thread

    January 24, 2018 - By 

    Phantom Thread is a ghost story dressed as a love story. It’s a beautiful, expertly cut ghoul. A glistening blood diamond. There is one literal apparition, briefly, a possible fever-induced hallucination by Reynolds Woodstock (Daniel Day-Lewis, out of retirement), a fashion designer for social royalty who speaks in a charming Herzogian murmur. He sees his dead mother at the end of his sickbed, still a little boy grieving over his precious mum, sad and wounded. The so-called House of Woodstock, the gorgeous London townhouse where he lives and works, is populated by its own cast of the barely-living. Paul Thomas…

  • The Commuter

    January 23, 2018 - By 

    Liam Neeson’s late-career rejuvenation as your taxi driver’s favourite action hero has largely been down to three European film-makers. French pair Luc Besson and Olivier Megaton wrote and directed the vengeful paterfamilias fantasies of the Taken series, while Spain’s Jaume Collet-Serra has directed Neeson in a series of highish-concept movies with interchangably forgettable titles: Run All Night (ticking-clock cops), Unknown (amnesia) and Non-Stop (murder at 16,000 feet). The latter’s locked-box story of an Air Marshall sniffing out a killer above the Atlantic provides a pretty obvious blueprint for the train-tracks mystery of Collet-Serra’s latest, The Commuter, in which Neeson plays…

  • The Final Year

    January 18, 2018 - By 

    ‘I keep saying we should get a countdown clock, with the weeks and days left’, suggests Samantha Power, the Obama administration’s representative to the United Nations, in Greg Barker’s up-close HBO documentary The Final Year. The appropriately named Power, an Irish child immigrant and former law professor bewitched by the promise of Senator Obama, is talking about instilling urgency in the President’s foreign policy team, who have twelve months left in his second term to wrap up their agendas and make them watertight for whoever comes next. The ticking clock — 10 months left, now 4, now 1 — is meant to cast their…