• Four Mothers

    April 10, 2025 - By 

    Irish director Darren Thornton returns with his enjoyable comedy, Four Mothers, a film that won the London Film Festival’s Audience Award. At the heart of the film is young adult fiction writer, Edward, played with intelligent humanity by James McArdle. Edward is on the cusp of a career breakthrough, having written a buzzy novel that’s about to be picked up by the American market. His publisher is arranging a promotional tour in the US and Edward is being invited on the radio to talk about his work. Sounds great, right? However, he is also the full-time carer of his mother,…

  • Sister Midnight

    March 12, 2025 - By 

    There’s a sequence at the beginning of Karan Kandhari’s BAFTA winning black comedy, Sister Midnight, in which the protagonist, Uma, wanders alone around her new Mumbai neighbourhood. It’s her wedding night, she’s just arrived, and her new husband in their arranged marriage has gone straight to sleep in the tiny one-room flat she now has to call home. Silently walking around the dark streets, she comes across a neon bandstand, empty and surrounded by the scattered debris of a festival: plastic cups, cigarette butts. Everyone has gone home. The party is well and truly over. Uma’s marital frustrations continue, as…

  • Cameron Menzies: A Bohemian Rhapsody

    September 13, 2021 - By 

    Storytelling on the grandest musical scale returns to Belfast when Northern Ireland Opera dusts itself off after a difficult eighteen months to present Giacomo Puccini’s much-loved opera La Bohème. This Parisian story of lust for life, of artists struggling to make ends meet and of uncertain futures, chimes loudly with these times. For NI Opera’s Artistic Director Cameron Menzies, who only took up the post in March, the road to La Bohème has been something of an opera in itself. “It’s been extraordinary,” the Australian laughs. “Yes, it’s a massive undertaking but people have worked so hard, with such dedication…

  • Color Out of Space

    February 28, 2020 - By 

    After his quarter-century exile from feature filmmaking, writer-director Richard Stanley returns with Lovecraftian passion project Color Out Of Space. It adapts H. P. Lovecraft’s short story of the same name, where an asteroid strikes a remote New England farm, unleashing an incomprehensible alien entity which begins to infect the bodies and minds of the family it finds there.  The combination of the excellent source material and Stanley—who even when his films were run ragged by studio interference remained a strikingly distinct visual stylist—should have made for an abundantly weird film, and yet the results are disappointingly orthodox. There is potential,…

  • Parasite

    February 7, 2020 - By 

    In the dystopic locomotion of 2013’s Snowpiercer, Bong Joon Ho charted social hierarchy along the X axis. His new film, the Palme d’Or-netting Parasite, swaps horizontal for vertical, delivering a nasty update of the upstairs/downstairs formula for the South Korean service economy. It starts, quite literally, underground. A teenage brother and sister sprinting through the Kim family’s basement flat in a panic, trailing phones along the ceiling to snag a stray thread of WiFi. Their ground-level window offers a view of shoes and trouser bottoms, the alley’s pissed and pissing. The smog of city fumigators seeps in, fogging the domicile like…

  • The Lighthouse

    January 31, 2020 - By 

    At the beginning of Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) arrives on a remote island with his superior, Tom Wake (Willem Dafoe), to tend to the titular beacon. Their path, along steep craggy cliffs in howling winds, was difficult, but there will be no relief inside either. As Winslow bumps his head on the low ceiling of their shared upstairs quarters, Wake is already urinating into a chamber pot, farting and barking orders about Winslow’s duties.  Life on the island is hard. Winslow’s tasks are back-breaking and seemingly never-ending, everything but the more rewarding nursing the light itself – a…

  • Uncut Gems

    January 17, 2020 - By 

    Uncut Gems, writer-directors Josh & Benny Safdie’s fifth feature together, starts full throttle and only occasionally lets up. It is fixed to the world and worldview of Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a jeweller for the stars in New York’s diamond district: a chancer and grifter, thriving in an ecosystem of insatiable avarice. As it becomes rapidly clear, he is a man that gets both a hit and an identity from triumphing over the constant barrage of knife-edge negotiations and impossible odds. Or, failing that, just surviving them. Ratner juggles his family life, with kids he is provisionally interested in and…

  • Little Women

    January 3, 2020 - By 

    Grab the green bin. Greta Gerwig’s dropped in one last gift. Little Women, the seventh cinematic (re)telling of Louisa May Alcott’s much-loved novel, is a perfect film for the dark, weird, listless days that trot along right behind Christmas. It’s Gerwig’s third directorial effort, and the second time she’s written and directed, after the slow-burn brilliance of 2017’s Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan’s best movie). The ensemble domestic drama follows the troubles and triumphs of the March’s, a contented but economically limited household in Civil War-era Massachusetts, as four sisters and their mother await their pastor patriarch’s return from the conflict,…

  • Le Mans ’66 (Ford v Ferrari)

    November 29, 2019 - By 

    Is this film a Ford, or a Ferrari? Le Mans ‘66 (titled Ford v Ferrari in other territories) is pretty clear about which one it would like to be. Ford is ugly; Ferrari is beautiful. Ford spits its cars out with production-line urgency, in drab plants overseen by Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts), a wounded capitalist nursing second-generation anxiety, whose generous girth symbolises his enterprise’s quantitative bloat. Ferrari’s vehicles, on the other hand, are products of artisanal care and Mediterranean exuberance. Ford is efficiency; Ferrari is eros.  James Mangold’s film sides with the dreamers. It opens with a quasi-mystical voiceover…

  • Monos

    November 14, 2019 - By 

    Every so often, a movie comes along that completely rips up the rule book of filmmaking. Alejandro Landes’ (2011’s Porfirio) does so right from the beginning of Monos, with its unforgettable and surreal opening sequence of young protagonists playing football with blindfolds in some undisclosed, ethereal landscape in a Latin American mountain range, surrounded by clouds, as some sort of awareness drill,. The viewer’s attention is shoved, almost in a voyeuristic manner, into their bizarre, hedonistic, militaristic, yet juvenile world. The story progresses at a relentless pace into its premise and finale, leaving the viewer in awe at this wonderfully relevant, strangely realistic, yet ruthlessly brutal…