• The Meg

    August 10, 2018 - By 

    Is it possible for a film to be not bad enough? Maybe that’s the wrong way to frame it. Shoddiness comes not just in quantity but in flavour: there’s good-bad, bad-bad, no-budget-bad, cheesy-bad, doomed-from-birth-bad. Producing high-yield schlock involves a precise cocktail of badness. The problem with The Meg, which feels like the frazzled product of heatwaved heads, is in its badness ratio: not enough fun-bad, too much boring-bad. The Meg, in which Jason Statham takes on a giant shark with growling one-liners and a steady harpoon arm, goes for two genre tones, and ends up splitting the difference. One is the…

  • The Darkest Minds

    August 8, 2018 - By 

    A dwindling genre still pushed by naturally rise-averse studios, the young-adult dystopic takes the us-versus-the-world siege mentality of the average teenager and kits it out with hyperbolic, now-predictable apocalyptic flourishes. A mysterious virus; economic breakdown; savage totalitarianism; stirrings of revolution. Adapted from the first novel of Alexandra Bracken’s YA trilogy with a screenplay from Chad Hodge and direction by Kung Fu Panda’s Jennifer Yuh Nelson, The Darkest Minds pits adults against kids with a savageness that’s almost comic. Youngsters either drop dead, get hunted by psycho bounty hunters, or find themselves herded into concentration camps to scrub boots for sociopaths in balaclavas. Even…

  • Teen Titans Go! To The Movies

    August 3, 2018 - By 

    “More jokes!” After D.C. and Warner Bros’ ultra-sombre film debuts left them with box office egg on their faces, the cinematic DCU has been itching, ever gradually, closer to the light, well-received populism of the Marvel house style. Justice League’s most human moment was a Josh Whedon gag; Wonder Woman swung for idealism and fish-out-of-water larks; the trailer for James Wan’s Aquaman suggests a dopey beef-bro underwater odyssey, while Shazam!‘s leans hard on the comedy, and seems to work. The memo’s gone out: the sillier the better. By that metric, Teen Titans Go! To The Movies is D.C.’s best film yet.…

  • Mission: Impossible – Fallout

    August 2, 2018 - By 

    “I’ll figure it out.” Ethan Hunt’s reassurance, repeated through Mission: Impossible — Fallout, is the mantra of the eternal optimist, one embodied perfectly by Tom Cruise, contemporary blockbuster cinema’s most industrious instrument of can-do energy, only but one of the diligently-spinning cogs in Christopher McQuarrie’s meticulously constructed, if occasionally overwhelmed, return to the Impossible brand. If the traditional, Bondian image of espionage (pre-Daniel Craig anyway) is that of effortless ease — a silencer under a dinner suit, a wry one-liner with alcohol on the breath — then in Cruise we get the opposite: intelligence work as aerobic overkill. Under the instruction of the Impossible series’ five distinct directors (McQuarrie…

  • The Devil’s Doorway

    July 20, 2018 - By 

    A pregnant woman in chains; the off-screen wailing of child spirits; close-ups of the Virgin Mary with lines of blood down her cheeks, weeping at the sights she sees. The Devil’s Doorway, a Northern Irish horror which last week screened in the Galway Film Fleadh, and received American release through IFC Midnight, is an efficient frightener with local colour and a dense, tight atmosphere of suffering, penance and punishment. You might call it Catholic guilt. The debut film from Belfast writer and director Aislinn Clarke, who lectures in Creative Writing at Queen’s University, and the first NI Screen-backed feature from…

  • Skyscraper

    July 19, 2018 - By 

    The studio summer blockbuster, a reliable genre of more!, seems the perfect fit for the bulking, hulking anatomy of Dwayne Johnson. In everything he does, The Rock operates in Trumpian economies of size: the largest pecs, the highest reps, the most humility. His last studio film, Rampage, released only three months ago, saw him partner with a gargantuan gorilla to fight Boulevard-sized beasties. Johnson’s latest, Skyscraper, casts him as a security expert forced to save his family from not just a burning building, but a building that happens to be the tallest one in the world. Yuuge. The architectural ambition…

  • Nazi Town, USA: Welcome to Leith’s Desperate, Unending Relevance

    July 13, 2018 - By 

    What would you do if Hitler moved in next door? Two years ago the Foyle Film Festival screened Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker’s documentary Welcome to Leith, a harrowing, stranger-than-fiction tale of Neo-Nazis trying to take over a tiny North Dakota town. I used to think about it about once a month. Now I think about it every day. Leith, Grant County is three square miles in size. You can fit the whole population in one train carriage. Its mayor is also the school bus driver. In 2012 it gets a new resident: a quiet, scraggy-haired older man…

  • ‘That Is Horror Already’: Aislinn Clarke on Magdalene Laundry Frightener The Devil’s Doorway

    July 11, 2018 - By 

    Earlier this year, the announcement of The Conjuring spin-off The Nun prompted movie site ledes about how scary nuns are the new scary clowns. But for Irish readers, Mother Superior’s terrors are nothing new. The trauma of the Magdalene Laundries — the island-wide network of religious asylums where vulnerable and ‘wayward’ women were imprisoned and forced to provide unpaid labour —lingers in Irish cultural memory. Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002) is the most well-known dramatisation of life in the institutions — the last of which closed in Belfast in only 1996 — but is being joined by new genre work. Premiering this week in New York…

  • Dublin Oldschool

    July 6, 2018 - By 

    It’s hard to picture Dublin Oldschool on the stage. Emmet Kirwan’s 2015 poem-play of the same name, which ran at the National Theatre and won the Stewart Parker award, finds rushing, thumping life on screen, with Kirwan staying on to screenwrite and star, joined by first-time feature director (and co-writer) Dave Tynan. Set free from its theatrical box, Oldschool is a film that never sits still for long. Set over the course of one druggy, downey, uppey bank holiday weekend in the Irish capital, Dublin Oldschool has a compellingly mobile energy. It snakes through Dublin’s streets and backalleys, across its…

  • The Pirates Don’t Eat The Tourists: Jurassic Park, 25 Years On

    June 14, 2018 - By 

    John Hammond is Steven Spielberg. Yes, it’s an obvious analogy: Richard Attenborough’s bio-engineering CEO and the maestro who directed him are both bearded childlike innocents, starry-eyed dreamers, alchemists who conjure stunning spectacles for an adoring public and make serious bank in the process. And both have seen their legacy squandered. In the twenty-five years since Jurassic Park’s release, across four sequels, the parks and their improbable animal attractions have been misused and mistreated, spiralling, in an inevitable logic Dr. Ian Malcolm would appreciate, towards chaos. In this month’s underwhelming Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom a burst of volcanic violence snuffs out…