• The Kid Who Would Be King

    February 15, 2019 - By 

    The Kid Who Would Be King is an old-fashioned film, and I don’t think Joe Cornish would mind it being called that. After some years spent contributing to studio scripts, the English writer-director follows up 2011’s Attack The Block with another tale of hearty contemporary misfits banding together to take on a deadly genre threat. The film is fuelled by issues of story-telling inheritance, drawing on Arthurian, fairy tale structures for a funny, down to Earth, quite moving tale of a young boy trying to figure out who he is. Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis) is a twelve year-old struggling with a…

  • Alita: Battle Angel

    February 11, 2019 - By 

    Sometimes crappy films are interesting. Their failures flag up ludicrous studio decision-making, or a creative ego gone unchecked, or just a series of small misguided steps that, in retrospect, were so obviously the wrong path to go down. For those of us professionally curious about why stories do or do not work, these movies are instructive and shareable; the critics’ version of “Hey, smell this!”. But, really, most of the time, bad or boring movies are bad or boring in ways that are totally predictable. Watching them is an exercise in low expectations met. Alita: Battle Angel, Robert Rodriguez’s big-screen…

  • Every Saoirse Ronan Film Ranked

    February 6, 2019 - By 

    The release last month of Mary Queen of Scots marked the twentieth on-screen role for Saoirse Ronan, who has, especially in the past few years, carved for herself a reputation as one of Ireland’s most talented and versatile actors. Press interviews with the 24 year-old, who first appeared as a 10 year-old on RTE’s The Clinic, often invoke her dual geographical upbringing—born in New York to Irish parents, later raised in Carlow and then Dublin—as a way to talk about the complexities of belonging, a theme which, it will be clear, runs through her work. Here is each of Ronan’s credited films, excluding voice…

  • Can You Ever Forgive Me?

    February 1, 2019 - By 

    Chin chin! A half-cut treat to see off a dry January, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is an immensely enjoyable and assured tragi-comic memoir, Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant in a spirited double act as a pair of grifting boozehounds in early 90’s New York. McCarthy has made her name playing loud, sweary and angry, but beneath her characters’ luridly detailed, improv-style threats of violence there is usually a blinking pilot light of sadness, marking women who feel beaten down, ignored and overlooked. The puppy-nabbing outsider in Bridesmaids; the minimum-wage worker in Tammy; the aggrieved middle-aged woman ditched by her husband in…

  • Polar

    January 29, 2019 - By 

    The world’s greatest assassin is about to retire when his former boss decides he’s a liability. Hoping for a silly shoot ‘em up like The Mechanic or John Wick? Sorry to disappoint but Polar, released this week by Netflix, isn’t it. Instead, this is a film so terrible that it’s an early contender for the year-end worst of lists. Duncan Vizla (Mads Mikkelsen) is the great assassin preparing for his 50th birthday and mandatory retirement. He’s already started to wind down by moving to a snow covered one-street town in Montana. There, Duncan wanders around his log cabin, buys a…

  • The Mule

    January 25, 2019 - By 

    In Clint Eastwood’s The Mule, The Man with No Name is faced with his biggest adversaries yet: Cartels, the DEA, and smartphones. A quite strange and mostly not very good version of what David Lowery and Robert Redford were doing in The Old Man And The Gun, Eastwood directs and stars as a 90 year-old horticulturist who has fallen on hard times and becomes a drugs mule for the local Cartel. Like Redford’s career criminal in Old Man, Mule is a possible swansong in which a screen icon plays a compulsive workaholic who has neglected his family. But Mule has a sourer…

  • Vice

    January 22, 2019 - By 

    “What, uh, do we believe, sir?” a young Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld’s aide during the Nixon years, asks his boss. Rumsfeld, played by Steve Carell, laughs hysterically, blindsided by the naivety of the question. Matters of personal principles and ideology simply do not factor into Washington power games. It’s a central concern in Vice, the latest in Anchorman director Adam McKay’s swerve from knockabout man-boy comedy to polemical film-making, but it’s also a question the film desperately needed to ask itself. What does McKay believe? What moral vision is he trying to put on screen? What on earth is Vice…

  • Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened

    January 21, 2019 - By 

    The word “hustle” used to denote a ruse or con game, a trick to fleece someone out of their cash. In the current parlance of hyper-go morning-routine capitalists, it’s taken on a new aspirational aura, now the religion of twenty three year-old dudes with Tim Ferris quotes in their bio. Following close on the heels of Hulu’s doppelganger doc Fyre Fraud, unavailable outside the U.S., Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened makes clear that, in many ways, the meaning of the word hasn’t shifted at all. Directed by Chris Smith (Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, another doc about…

  • The Upside

    January 16, 2019 - By 

    Phillip Lacasse doesn’t want to be patronised. Played by Bryan Cranston, the disabled billionaire, rendered paralysed from the neck down by a paragliding accident, doesn’t want people making a fuss over him, speaking over him or adopting that pitying tone you would take with a shy child. He hires unemployed ex-con Dell (Kevin Hart, making the radical leap from bad comedy to bad comic drama) as his live-in life auxiliary precisely because he doesn’t tiptoe around his condition. How unfortunate, then, that he finds himself in a film that is so consistently patronising: to him, to his new buddy, and,…

  • The Camino Voyage

    January 14, 2019 - By 

    Four Irishmen in a boat. It sounds like the start of a joke. The Camino Voyage, directed by Irish documentarian Donal O’Ceilleachair, chronicles the attempt of four Kerry men — and later, adding a dash of name-recognition, The Frames frontman Glen Hansard — to travel the traditional route of the Camino de Santiago, also known as the Way of Saint James, an ancient pilgrimage from Ireland to a Galician cathedral in northern Spain. With an appreciation for symmetry, the group — two writers, an artist and a stonemason — set off from St. James’ Gate in Dublin, on a passageway across the Irish Sea, the Atlantic’s edge, and…