• BFF 19: Float Like A Butterfly

    April 18, 2019 - By 

    “It’s not about how many times you get hit, it’s abut how many times you get back up.” A flash of Rocky Balboa machismo seems inevitable in Float Like A Butterfly, another dose of feel-good Irish quasi-realism from the producers of Once and Sing Street. But Carmel Winters’ film, her second after 2010’s Snap, complicates the sentiment, delivering it in a moment of desperation, as a proud Traveller forces his meek son into a seaside fistfight he’s wholly untrained for. For the teenage Frances (Hazel Doupe), fighting is a means of asserting herself in a world where hostility comes from…

  • BFF 19: Birds of Passage

    April 17, 2019 - By 

    Plagues, locusts and temptation in the desert: Birds of Passage is biblical in its grandeur and moral ruin. The current cultural fetizishation of drug cartel savagery is vampiric and lazy racism. Can-you-believe-this travelogues and “dark tourism” tours take the cash of white hipsters to show them the houses where monsters lived, while much TV and film deploys stock montages of whirring cash counting machines, biped planes stuffed with narcotics and South Americans going loco, bro. But Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s follow-up to 2015’s Oscar-nominated Embrace of the Serpent cuts through the fake glamour and returns to the roots of…

  • BFF 19: A Bump Along The Way

    April 15, 2019 - By 

    Opening the 19th Belfast Film Festival, Mark Cousins, newly installed Chairperson and mega-watt generator of cinematic enthusiasm, advertised the rectangular frame of Movie House Dublin Road as a place where Belfast will “meet the world”. For the inaugural night, at least, the world is the other side of Ulsterbus 273. Northern Ireland’s second city, and the experiences of the women living there, is receiving fresh attention with the success of Lisa Magee’s likeable Derry Girls, and is joined by Tess McGowan and Shelly Love’s A Bump Along The Way, a broad, sometimes difficult local indie with a sympathetic eye for feminine…

  • Happy as Lazzaro

    April 9, 2019 - By 

      Reality slips and slides in Happy as Lazzaro (“Lazzaro Felice”), the third feature from Italian film-maker Alice Rohrwacher, a curious, engrossing magic realist drama animated by cycles of power, class and history. The film seems to hang continuously in the air, suspended and provisional. On an Italian country estate named Inviolata (“unviolated”: a virginal space, a fake Paradise of simple toil), generations of sharecroppers work pitiless schedules, harvesting tobacco for the owner, the cartoonishly imperious Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna (Nicoletta Braschi), receiving no wages and chipping away at a perma-debt that holds them captive. The crisp visual textures and cramped…

  • Shazam!

    April 9, 2019 - By 

    Bam! A flash of lightning hits and, just like that, D.C.’s moviescape jolts into life, pumped up on the wisecrack adrenaline of hot red and yellow. Losing faith in its core Clark and Bruce brand, Warner Bros. and D.C. Studios are finding returns pivoting towards the weird and the unexpected. After all, their most entertaining round of post-Nolan superheroics was the one hardly anybody actually saw: last year’s Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, a self-aware, colourful, sing-songy adventure aimed squarely at kids that succeeds by hitting jokes and delivering a believable character arc. Echoing Titans’ story impetus of a…

  • The Dig

    March 28, 2019 - By 

    The Irish bog is fertile metaphorical soil. It’s dank, ancient, unforgiving. It brings you down and sucks you in and swallows you up. It is our countryside version of Jordan Peele’s sunken place. In The Dig, filmed in soggy Northern Irish landscapes, the bog represents obsession, or death, or the past; ideal terrain for a moody murder-mystery drama drenched in male guilt. Written by Stuart Drennan, whose 2014 film Breaker also turned on questions of memory and buried secrets, and marking the feature directorial debut of Belfast-born brothers Andy and Ryan Tohill, The Dig gets much out of its basic premise…

  • Minding the Gap

    March 20, 2019 - By 

    For about a half hour, Minding the Gap lulls you into a false sense of security. The opening passages of the documentary introduce us to two Rockfort skaters, Zack and Keire; Zack is a young father struggling to support his family, while Keire is a timid teenager who becomes increasingly desperate to leave the city. The film intercuts stories of their troubled youths with incredible footage of them skating around the streets of Rockfort. While Keire and Zack still reel from the abuse their fathers inflicted upon them as children, they rhapsodize about the escapist nature of skateboarding. More importantly,…

  • The Kindergarten Teacher

    March 15, 2019 - By 

    For a film about a frustrated, unhappy child educator, The Kindergarten Teacher is surprisingly quiet. No chaotic scenes of brats in meltdowns and screaming teachers wilting with stress. In fact, New York teacher Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal) seems to have lucked out. Her little ones are well-behaved and she seems to genuinely like them, navigating her classroom with that airy, benign, vaguely lupine air Gyllenhaal does so well. Her days tick along in well-observed routine: cleaning toilets, pouring fruit juice and washing dishes in tiny sink. But there is unfulfilment seeping out of her. In the downtime it is deafening. Sara Colangelo’s…

  • Tyrel

    March 11, 2019 - By 

    Like Sebastián Silva’s previous films, Tyrel walks the tightrope between psychological drama and out-and-out horror. Interpersonal conflicts come to the fore in strange, unpredictable ways. The tension is palpable, the level of cringe punishing. The film takes place over the course of one wild weekend. Tyler has been invited by his friend Johnny to drink with his childhood buddies. Being thrown into a new group of people can be anxiety-inducing enough, but once Tyler meets Johnny’s fratboy mates, it quickly becomes clear that he’s the only black man among them, adding an extra layer of unspoken tension. What makes Tyrel…

  • Capernaum

    March 1, 2019 - By 

    “My life is dogshit.” Zain El Hajj, the young protagonist of Nadine Labaki’s third feature Capernaum, which competed for the Foreign Language prize at last week’s Oscars, is not having such a good time of it. Twelve years old with an asterix (as a child to undocumented parents, there’s no birth certificate for confirmation), Zain endures a monotonous, shabby, profoundly unnourishing childhood in Beirut’s dilapidated urban sprawl. Played by Zain Al Rafeea, a Syrian refugee himself, the young lad lives with his large family in a rotting apartment owned by their cousin Assad, in whose shop some of the kids spend…