• Docs Ireland: The Inventor

    June 19, 2019 - By 

    An “invention” is, of course, not just a product you make, it’s a story you tell, a fancy you fashion. This linguistic slipperiness runs through Alex Gibney’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, his gripping critique of StartUpLand, a place pathologically allergic to plain speaking. Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) is one of the definitive portraits of corporate American group-think, flagging up the delusional market faith that would help decimate economies a couple of years later. The dangerous sway of belief and magical thinking are recurring preoccupations of the film-maker— his previous film was…

  • Docs Ireland: 2040

    June 14, 2019 - By 

    The screening of 2040 was packed with schoolchildren thanks to the involvement of Into Film, a Northern Irish charity focused on film as an educational tool, and it’s easy to see why Docs Ireland extended the invite. The film, presented and directed by Australia’s Damon Gameau, is a layperson’s guide to the causes of, and urgently needed possible solutions to, rapid climate breakdown, and a love letter to his daughter and the possible futures she will inhabit. There is a breezy pedagogical tone to the film, in which Gameau, via to-camera testimony, narration and slightly hokey visual aids, outlines the physical…

  • Docs Ireland: The Silence of Others

    June 14, 2019 - By 

    “Spain is covered in mass graves.” Buried wells of grief and pain stir underneath Spain’s transition from decades-long dictatorship to holiday destination democracy in Robert Bahar and Almudena Carracedo’s El silencio de otros (The Silence of Others), a sobering, difficult documentary with deep resonance for our own state and its preoccupation with protocols of remembering and forgetting. Mass executions, concentration camps, torture stations, stolen babies. Francoist Spain was a horror story, one that occupies less space in cultural memory than comparable collections of atrocities. Part of the reason for this is the so-called Pact of Forgetting, a bill passed following…

  • Papi Chulo

    June 7, 2019 - By 

    2016’s Handsome Devil, a minor hit and the second film from Irish director John Butler, turned on issues of gay estrangement and unlikely male friendship. It balanced melodrama and excesses — like Andrew Scott’s literature teacher and his ‘Oh Captain, My Captain’ grandstanding — with a genuinely sweet consideration of the loneliness and alienation that comes with being young, gay and wayward. Butler channelled his own difficult queer history into a generally broad treatment, a heightening and blending of Irish cinematic tones. Papi Chulo takes Butler out of the island for the first time, but operates along similar thematic and tonal lines for its story of…

  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters

    May 31, 2019 - By 

    The world is ending. And even if politicians don’t know it, blockbuster cinema does. Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the lizard king’s thirty-fifth film and the third in Legendary’s MonsterVerse (sigh) franchise, begins soaked in the visual vocab of disaster. Fire, rain, rubble, and parents screaming the names of buried children. In the background, skydiving trails signal the stand-out set-piece from 2014’s Godzilla, whose domestic drama has been swapped for Vera Farmiga and Kyle Chander’s estranged married couple and their daughter (Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown) dealing with the realities of a post-monster world. Sort of, but not really: King…

  • Aladdin

    May 30, 2019 - By 

    How is it possible for something to be both the same, and less? It’s a curious philosophical achievement Disney have found themselves excelling at since they decided to take their beloved animated properties out of Walt-style cryo-freeze and serve them back up to us, re-animated in flesh and blood. The latest in the mega-corp’s line of live-action simulacrums, Aladdin is a magic carpet ride that never gets off the ground, a weirdly lumpy Arabian Nights retread from Guy Ritchie, the obvious go-to guy for a fun, campy Middle Eastern romance. It’s much the same as you remember: Aladdin (Mena Massoud)…

  • Avengers: Endgame

    April 26, 2019 - By 

    God bless Robert Downey Jr. As Tony Stark, the lonely tin man with a hole in his chest, Downey Jr. does more with his face than all of the Avengers films’ awkward speechifying about teamwork, solidarity and what it means to be Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. A decade of story-telling synergy comes to a close with Avengers: Endgame. So much of it is the sludge we’ve become used to, but when the thrusters kick in, and the film finds its heart, it’s because of Downey Jr. He almost — but not quite — makes all of this worth it. It’s been some time since the…

  • Q&A With Andy & Ryan Tohill, Directors of The Dig

    April 23, 2019 - By 

    Digging up the past is dirty business. Northern Irish indie The Dig, the first feature from brothers Andy and Ryan Tohill, brings viewers out to the bog, for a grubby, mucky, effective drama of guilt and redemption. Written by Stuart Drennan and assisted by NI Screen, the film stars Moe Dunford as Ronan Callahan, a convicted murderer with a memory problem who returns to his small Irish village and finds the father of his apparent victim (Lorcan Cranitch) on an obsessive quest to unearth his daughter’s body. Flagged by Emily Taafe as the victim’s sister, and Francis Magee as a menacing Sergeant, the repentant Ronan picks…

  • BFF 19: Beats

    April 22, 2019 - By 

    Wrapping up this year’s Belfast Film Festival, Michele Devlin and Mark Cousins took to the podium and paid tribute, in brittle delivery, to the spirit of the festival and its organisers — generous, curious, international — and to the legacy of murdered journalist Lyra McKee, who had been involved with Doc Fest, the Festival’s documentary spin-off. Some of the best and worst of Northern Ireland running in tandem. We need some catharsis, and closing film Beats, directed by Brian Welsh and adapted by Kieran Hurley from his own play, is just the ticket, an affectionate celebration of friendship, connection and the delight of being…

  • BFF 19: Eighth Grade

    April 18, 2019 - By 

    If you are someone who finds the multi-pronged genius of Bo Burnham gallingly unjust, then brace yourself. The comedian has turned to film-making, and nailed it on his first go. Burnham has spoken about his own anxiety issues, and Eighth Grade beams us directly into the headspace of maybe the most anxious species on the planet: an introverted 13 year old girl who doesn’t know how to be cool. Kayla (the unforgettable Elsie Fisher) is a sweet, awkward kid about to finish the titular class year and head into the dizzying young adulthood of high school. At school she has…