• 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…

  • Set It Up

    June 21, 2018 - By 

    A romantic comedy designed from the stuff of nightmares for HR departments, Set It Up is an entertaining if slight story about workplace romances, demanding bosses and overworked employees. The main romance is between two overworked assistants who decide to set their demanding bosses up in the hope of spending less time in the office. Harper (Zoey Deutch), a sports and popcorn obsessive, wants to write and date but struggles to do either because of the hours she puts in at the office. Charlie (Glen Powell) is looking to secure a promotion to increase his salary while maintaining his relationship with his model girlfriend…

  • The Boy Downstairs

    June 13, 2018 - By 

    HBO’s Girls has become a shorthand for certain kinds of New Yorkian slice of life dramedies and romances, shaped by the ‘hipster’ spaces and attitudes of articulate inner-city millenials. Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour (2014), for example, which presented a same-sex relationship and breakup in rom-com retrospective, got labelled by some outlets as a lesbian version of Lena Dunham’s show (on which Akhavan later made an appearance). New rom-com The Boy Downstairs, the first feature from writer-director Sophie Brooks, an NYU film school grad, invites the same comparisons. Its details suggest the aesthetic geography of the urban creatives — a craft beer store, a twinkly roof party, a…

  • Book Club

    June 7, 2018 - By 

    Partly a feature-length advertisement for Random House’s most famous erotic novel series, partly an unintentional satire about the dire state of affairs for older female actors in Hollywood, partly a bland romantic comedy that sticks to formula, Book Club’s eye-raising hook centres on a group of autumnal friends who read 50 Shades of Grey and find their libidinal juices suddenly brought to the boil. It’s like a producer read one of those 2011 articles about middle-aged housewives renovating their own personal Red Rooms, click his ‘treatment’ fingers and then the thing sat in production for seven years. The Christian Grey…

  • Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

    June 7, 2018 - By 

    Welcome to cinema’s annual extinction event. Or, as it’s known around these parts, the summer. ‘Fallen’ is the word alright. We are a long way from the expertly choreographed, memorably human spectacles that launched a thousand lunchboxes back in ’93. The Jurassic series has struggled to replicate the original Spielberg magic and the exhaustion continues with Fallen Kingdom, the fifth in the franchise and the second in Universal’s second round of ill-fated trips to Isla Nublar (are there any other kind?). Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow, having gotten the call from Kathleen Kennedy, is out, but he and Derek Connolly have stayed on writing duties.…

  • Life of the Party

    May 16, 2018 - By 

    Life of The Party is a comedy about the danger of compromising for your partner. Melissa McCarthy plays the homely, mumsy Deanna, whose husband Dan announces he’s filing for divorce just after they drop their daughter off for her first college semester. Feeling sucker-punched and bereft, she decides to enrol in the college herself and finish the archaeology degree she abandoned when she got pregnant. Dan (Veep’s Matt Walsh) is shacking up with a glamorous realtor (Modern Family’s Julie Bowen), leaving Deanna bitter at having put him first all her life and having little to show for it. The message…

  • Avengers: Infinity War

    April 27, 2018 - By 

    Yeah, there’s some spoilers. “We’re in the end game,” announces Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dr. Strange in Avengers: Infinity War. Sure we are Steve, but it’s a long game. For ten years the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been in the group stages. Infinity War is the qualifying round. There’s still the semis to look forward to. The basic narrative logic of Marvel Studios’ unprecedented and profitable experiment in serialised story-telling is that of deferred gratification. Maybe you liked this specific film, maybe you didn’t. But hey, check out what’s coming up next. Here’s Spider-Man. Here’s the Guardians of the Galaxy. Here’s the big bad…

  • Mercury 13

    April 26, 2018 - By 

    We might not be able to change the past, but there is always the opportunity to learn from it. This is the central theme of Mercury 13, the latest release in Netflix’s original documentary strand. It tells the story of the women who aspired to be among the first astronauts but faced rejection because of their sex. In 1960, 25 women were chosen to take part in a privately funded ‘women in space’ study. The project was organised by Dr Randy Loveless who had supervised the selection tests for NASA’s first astronauts, the Mercury 7. Each woman was a highly…

  • Belfast Film Fest: The Rider

    April 23, 2018 - By 

    Lame horses get shot and broken cowboys get put out to pasture in Chloé Zhao’s The Rider, a soulful, touching look at ranchers and riders in the modern American heartland, based on the real-life experiences of its lead, former rodeo performer Brady Jandreau. Zhao, who previously looked at vulnerabilities on the open plain in 2015’s Songs My Brother Taught Me, casts unknowns and keeps the film light and loose, its wide open landscapes of sky and rock the backdrop to the pain of a talented rodeo cowboy forced to hang up his stirrups and face the existentialist wilderness after suffering a…

  • Belfast Film Fest: Golden Dawn Girls

    April 19, 2018 - By 

    Ourania Michaloliakou, a dumpy Greek twenty-something, loves Disney movies. She has a bookcase full of them. She loves board games with her friends and cute cats and doggies, using her position on the Athens city council to support stray animal causes. She also wants to liquidate her political rivals. Ourania is the daughter and only child of Nikolaos Michaloliakos, founder and leader of the far-right, ultra-nationalist political party Golden Dawn, a previously obscure movement rocketed into national prominence in the fallout of the financial and European refugee crises. In the chilling but limited Golden Dawn Girls, Norwegian director Håvard Bustnes probes…