• Dublin Film Fest: Beast

    February 27, 2018 - By 

    Lies told to protect the feelings of a loved one can have untold consequences. In Beast, troubled Moll (Jessie Buckley) decides to leave her birthday party to go dancing. After staying out all night, she meets Pascal (Johnny Flynn), a handsome outsider in grubby jeans and a torn t-shirt. On impulse, Moll covers for him when they are stopped at a police checkpoint. The initial attraction between Moll and Pascal develops into a passionate connection, much to the distress of Moll’s family. Her mother Hilary (Gerarldine James) is distant and controlling while her siblings treat Moll with casual disdain. Every…

  • Lady Bird

    February 23, 2018 - By 

    Screenwriting 101, they say, is create conflict. Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), the protagonist of writer-director Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, is a constant source of conflict, perennially fighting with all those around her. For what, she’s not always sure, it’s simply who she is. Her fighting is a form of self-expression, she’s fighting for her self-expression. As she says when a Father at her Catholic high school asks if “Lady Bird” is her given name- “Yes, I gave it to myself. It’s given to me, by me.” Set in 2002, Christine’s roller coaster final year of high school provides…

  • Dublin Film Fest: Black 47

    February 23, 2018 - By 

    The blackness is in the land, of course, the blight that’s reduced potatoes to asbestos, but, in Dublin Film Festival opener Black 47, it’s also in the hearts of the men who hold dominion over the land, and in the empire that produces them. Set in 1847, as crop failure and fever decimates the native Irish population, Lance Daly’s fourth feature reimagines the Great Irish Famine as a righteous revenge Western, a muddy, politically cynical chase thriller with shades of Rambo. James Frecheville stars as Michael Feeney, a Connacht man who returns home from overseas service in the British Army, to…

  • Fifty Shades Freed

    February 14, 2018 - By 

    Three Valentine’s Days later, it’s finally over. Jamie Dornan has been humiliated and audiences have been punished, but by this point you know what you’re in for. In order to get anything from Fifty Shades Freed, the climax to this improbable trilogy, you have to just hold up your hands and submit. Christian Grey gets his happy ending. The rest of us will have to get our rocks off elsewhere. Picking off where Darker left off, the soap opera romance is in full swing. There’s still the odd trip to the Red Room, sure, but Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) and Christian (Dornan)…

  • The 15.17 To Paris

    February 14, 2018 - By 

    On 21 August 2015, on a cross-border train from Amsterdam to Paris, a Moroccan man named Ayoub El Khazzan emerged from a toilet cubicle shirtless, an AKM assault rifle in his hands. He shot a passenger who tried to intervene and then went to open fire on the carriage, but the weapon jammed, allowing three young American men to rush El Khazzan and prevent further violence. Afterwards Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone, two of whom were off-duty members of the U.S. Armed Services, received the Legion of Honour, the highest decoration of the French Republic. Back home, Stone earned a…

  • Journey’s End

    February 12, 2018 - By 

    On the 100 year anniversary of the end of The First World War, director Saul Dibb (Suite Francaise) and writer Simon Reade (Private Peaceful) have adapted R.C. Sheriff’s 1928 play, based on his real-life experiences, to serve as a timely, gut-punch of a reminder of the horrors of this dark period in our history. And with an exceptional British cast and an absolutely astoundingly detailed production, Journey’s End is a surefire war classic. Set during the last year of the war in 1918, the story centres around British infantry unit C-company, as they make their way to the frontline trenches in…

  • Glory (Slava)

    February 12, 2018 - By 

    Glory (Slava) is a satire about the hypocrisies of power and class within contemporary Bulgarian society. Like the Russian-made watch of the title, this film has been constructed with purpose. The watch keeps time; the film tells a modern parable about a small act of thoughtlessness and its consequences. Solitary railway worker Tzanko (Stefan Denolyubov) comes across a mysterious pile of cash on train tracks. He reports his find to the authorities. Tzanko is honest but also isolated, disliked by his colleagues and shown little kindness by his peers. The Ministry of Transport’s head of public relations Julia Staykova (Margita Gosheva) regards…

  • Phantom Thread

    January 24, 2018 - By 

    Phantom Thread is a ghost story dressed as a love story. It’s a beautiful, expertly cut ghoul. A glistening blood diamond. There is one literal apparition, briefly, a possible fever-induced hallucination by Reynolds Woodstock (Daniel Day-Lewis, out of retirement), a fashion designer for social royalty who speaks in a charming Herzogian murmur. He sees his dead mother at the end of his sickbed, still a little boy grieving over his precious mum, sad and wounded. The so-called House of Woodstock, the gorgeous London townhouse where he lives and works, is populated by its own cast of the barely-living. Paul Thomas…

  • The Commuter

    January 23, 2018 - By 

    Liam Neeson’s late-career rejuvenation as your taxi driver’s favourite action hero has largely been down to three European film-makers. French pair Luc Besson and Olivier Megaton wrote and directed the vengeful paterfamilias fantasies of the Taken series, while Spain’s Jaume Collet-Serra has directed Neeson in a series of highish-concept movies with interchangably forgettable titles: Run All Night (ticking-clock cops), Unknown (amnesia) and Non-Stop (murder at 16,000 feet). The latter’s locked-box story of an Air Marshall sniffing out a killer above the Atlantic provides a pretty obvious blueprint for the train-tracks mystery of Collet-Serra’s latest, The Commuter, in which Neeson plays…

  • Hostiles

    January 22, 2018 - By 

    Scott Cooper (Black Mass) is a writer/director who always delves into the gritty underbelly of the US, casting an unflinching eye over its history and social traits. With Hostiles, he moves into the Western genre, and right from the shocking opening sequence, you know you are not in for a good ole boy, John Waynesque movie. And while he does occasionally move into the realm of cliche and generic storytelling that lurks in all his movies, I can’t help but admire his take on Donald E. Stewart’s (Patriot Games) manuscript and this much-flaunted genre, as he’s taken great pains to…