• 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…

  • Kissing Candice

    June 20, 2018 - By 

    This review was originally published as part of the Belfast Film Festival ’18 coverage. The Omagh-born Aoife McArdle showcased her feature debut, Kissing Candice, at the Belfast Film Festival, but she’s a director and screenwriter with plenty of experience and a well-developed eye, a confidence that shines through in the film, a mad, bad, thrilling vision of libidinal teenage energy. Billed by McArdle at a post-show Q&A as a look at ‘Irish youth in crisis’, Candice, from Venom Films and the Irish Film Board, is so much more interesting and vivid than the description, with its suggestion of bleeding-heart melancholic…

  • Rampage

    April 13, 2018 - By 

    Even in stupidity there can be poetry. In the Midway Games’ Rampage series, released across arcades and consoles since 1986, the player controls a giant rat, ape or alligator whose sole objective is to destroy as much urban landscape as possible. Smash, smash, smash. Totally, blissfully uncomplicated. Things like ‘plot’ and personable characterisation weren’t pressing priorities. But a writer room abhors a vacuum, and the big-screen Rampage, the latest vehicle for one-man industry Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, expands the building-bashing conceit into a messy, tonally wild and strangely restrained man versus monster blockbuster. The focus of Rampage is a hulking…

  • Michael Inside

    April 12, 2018 - By 

    There can be a certain suspicion about films that generate a lot of positive advance word. Can any film really be that good? Is it all hype? Thankfully, the fuss about Michael Inside is justified. This is a terrific piece of film-making about the consequences of one moment in a young man’s life. Michael McCrea (Dafhyd Flynn) is 18 years old and lives with his grandfather Francis (Lalor Roddy) in a housing estate in a disadvantaged area of Dublin. His father is in prison and his mother died from a drugs overdose when he was younger. Michael has plans to…

  • A Quiet Place

    April 10, 2018 - By 

    For anyone forced to do the Sunday visit rounds, the concept of family life as an exercise in barely tolerable, near-silent tension is a familiar one. The pause between programme and adverts. The clacking clock hand on an ugly mantelpiece. The latest in John Krasinski’s canny pivot from straight-to-camera GIF-ery to leading man robustness, A Quiet Place brings high-concept genre logic to family quiet time, positing a near-future in which humanity has been devastated by insectoid alien invaders, so-called ‘dark angels’, with no sight organs but a highly tuned sense of hearing, perking up at minor wallops and bangs a mile away. Krasinki…

  • Grief Is The Thing With Feathers (O’Reilly Theatre, Dublin)

    April 2, 2018 - By 

    Grief is the thing with feathers, and Cillian Murphy is the thing with talent. Based on the poetry/prose book of the same name by Max Porter, Grief Is The Thing With Feathers breathes life into death, centring around Dad (Cillian Murphy), The Boys (Taighen O’Callaghan, Felix Warren) and Mum (Hattie Morahan). Murphy began his acting career in director Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs and is back collaborating with him once again in Grief. The playwright and director, also known for Ballyturk and Mistermen, has adapted the work into an enthralling and heart-wrenching experience for the audience. The set consists of a simple apartment filled…

  • Love, Simon

    April 2, 2018 - By 

    Love, Simon is a queer teen drama that wants you to know up front it’s sorry for being so, well, straight. Loosely adapted from Becky Albertalli’s 2015 novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, the film opens with a voiceover from Simon Spier (Nick Robinson), providing a mea culpa for his boring, stable life, the kind of intensely comfortable existence accepted as default by studio teenage flicks. Simon lives in a gorgeous house with his younger sister and hot parents (Jennifer Garner and Transformers’ Josh Duhamel). He gives his happy, handsome friends rides to school in the morning, picking up iced lattes…

  • Ready Player One

    March 28, 2018 - By 

    After Steven Spielberg changed the movie world with Jaws in 1975, he bought a cavernous Beverley Hills home and filled it with arcade machines. Newly minted and paranoid, the director also installed an elaborate security system, and refused to accept deliveries at the door. Hollywood’s hottest director and his walled-off playpen. Ready Player One is a film built for Spielberg The Younger, from Spielberg The Elder, a cautionary celebration of pop culture toy islands, a messy, whizzing trip into the lens-flare fantasies of the geek id. In Ready Player One, ‘the OASIS’ is the biggest toy-box ever invented. A giant virtual reality and intensely lucrative…

  • A Wrinkle in Time

    March 28, 2018 - By 

    In ‘Anthem’ Leonard Cohen sang ‘there is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.’ These lines have been adopted as an inspirational saying by many but they also reflect the idea that it is often the imperfections that make an object beautiful. Perhaps, the same can be said about the flaws in Disney’s latest big budget children’s film A Wrinkle in Time. Teenage Meg Murray (Storm Reid) is struggling following her scientist father’s disappearance four years earlier. Isolated and lonely, Meg’s grief has made as a social outcast who is out of sync with her peers and losing…