• London Korean Film Festival Comes To QFT

    November 17, 2017 - By 

    As part of the UK tour of the London Korean Film Festival, this weekend Queen’s Film Theatre will be presenting a selection of new and contemporary Korean gangster cinema. First up is Die Bad (Friday 17th, 6.20) the wild 2000 debut from Ryoo Seung-wan. Made on a tight budget, it’s a wild gang saga stitched together from a series of shorts. Next is writer-director Park Hoon-jung’s crime drama New World (Saturday 18th, 6.20), a thoughtful, intricate cops and criminals clasher. Finally, there is the chance for NI audiences to get a look at The Merciless (Sunday 19th, 6.20), a swaggering crime-action…

  • The Florida Project

    November 14, 2017 - By 

    When you’re a kid, almost anywhere can be the happiest place on earth. That’s the case for Moonee (Brooklyn Prince), the 6 year-old with weaponised precociousness at the centre of The Florida Project, enjoying a bright, aimless Orlando summer at the Magic Castle, a packed low-rent motel where she lives with her young, single mother Halley (Bria Vinaite). Perched on the fringes of Disneyland’s high-commerce funtopia— the helicopter blades of VIPs buzz overheard— the lurid purple paint of the Magic Castle could easily be mistaken for one of the resort’s attractions (Indeed, one Brazilian couple make the wrong booking for…

  • Conor McGregor: Notorious

    November 7, 2017 - By 

    Part of the fascination surrounding Conor McGregor is that so many people who claim not to care about the Dubliner spend so much time talking about him. The persona; the cars; the suits; the bravado – all gets discussed routinely around pub tables and all of it gets minutely dissected. Is he bringing shame on the nation or representing a sea change in what it means to be Irish? Is he a highly skilled sportsman or a street brawler participating in thinly-veiled barbarism? Is he a showman or a bigot? Is he both? Notorious offers little answers on the above.…

  • Thor: Ragnorok

    October 27, 2017 - By 

    In July I wrote that Spider-Man: Homecoming was the funniest Marvel movie so far, a distinction that has lasted all of, oh, three months. Actually, Thor: Ragnorok is the funniest one yet. The Marvel factory, whatever its faults, is pumping out plain old good times on overtime hours. Ragnorok, the third and presumably final solo outing for Chris Hemsworth’s Men’s Health Goldilocks, retains some of the studio’s familiar issues, but makes up for them by being — for long stretches — honest to goodness hilarious. The Lord — sorry, God — of thunder is front of house, but Kiwi film-maker Taiki Waititi is the man of the hour,…

  • Happy Death Day

    October 20, 2017 - By 

    Happy Death Day is a minor slasher remix built around repetition, in a genre already prone to it. Theresa, or ‘Tree’ (Jessica Rothe), is a sorority sister bi-atch who wakes up in a stranger’s dorm bed, hungover and late for class. It’s her birthday, the same as her late mother’s, and she’s in a bad mood, ignoring her Dad’s persistent calls and carrying on with a married professor. She seems to have been in a bad mood for a while. Late that night she gets cornered in a dark underpass on campus by a creep in a buck-toothed baby mask…

  • Blade Runner 2049

    October 6, 2017 - By 

    1982’s Blade Runner was a melancholic neo-noir as impressive for its shapeless sorrow as for its far-reaching influence on sci-fi design and lexicon. In Ridley Scott, Hampton Fancher and David Peoples’ transformation of Philip K. Dick’s story, anyone with sense and money had escaped “off-world”, abandoning Earth to broken boys and their broken toys, the hazy urban air thick with the defeatism of gumshoe vice noir. The electric sheep of an Art Deco future-L.A., along with their shepherds and predators, drifted along in a kind of dreamworld, where identity and memory had turned fluid and suspicious, thanks to the Replicants,…

  • The Mountain Between Us

    October 5, 2017 - By 

    The Mountain Between Us, a disaster-romance directed by Hany Abu-Assad and starring Idris Elba and Kate Winslet, is immediately identifiable as a book adaptation (Charles Martin’s 2010 novel). It feels like a lurid-but-chaste paperback you’d find at a train station reading desk, or on your mum’s bedside cabinet. The cover image would be two handsome lovers, wrapped in ski gear, snuggled up against the warm glow of a cabin fire. In other words, the impression here is not of danger, or life-in-the-balance peril. The only real tension is wondering how quickly they’re going to bang. The mountain, in case you…

  • The Work

    September 27, 2017 - By 

    The Work, an intimate observational documentary from Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous, features the closest thing to real-life exorcisms you might ever see. In a grey cinder block room in California’s Folsom State Prison, a maximum security jailhouse made famous by Johnny Cash’s blues, small pockets of men sit on fold-up chairs, unspooling their deepest, most complicated feelings. One convict is desperate to let down his guard and mourn his sister. His group form a circle and coach him on breathing and posture, as he stands silent, tense, diving inside to retrieve the pain. Something rumbles up his chest and…

  • mother!

    September 22, 2017 - By 

    mother! is a slow burner panic attack. Imagine being an introvert who throws a house party but sets the invitation as Public. You’re trying to scrub Glen’s and Fanta out of the nice rug but there’s a mob in your kitchen, and, suddenly, crash! The sound of plates hitting marble. Or you’re a young woman married to your professor, two decades your senior, and you give, and dote, and adore, but one day you realise he might not need you the way you need him, and that’s terrifying, and the more he withdraws the more desperate you get. Or you’re…

  • Kingsman: The Golden Circle

    September 20, 2017 - By 

    Golden shower, more like. The unpleasant, unrelenting Kingsman: The Golden Circle drenches viewers in water-thin spy adventuring for a demanding two hour twenty session, before zipping up and flipping the bird, leaving a faint funk hanging in the room. 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service, Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman working off Mark Millar’s comic, pursued its ‘Bond, but chav’ conceit with a comic bravado that was often ridiculous or annoying but at least showed some chutzpah, subverting Her Majesty’s Service niceties with its vein of laddish nastiness. Vaughn and Goldman return for the sequel, the former directing again, and the…