• Ad Astra

    September 27, 2019 - By 

    Science fiction has undoubtedly been a bit lacking in quantity and quality in recent years, and so you could be forgiven for getting excited after watching the trailer for Ad Astra, the latest from The Lost City of Z‘s James Gray, which translates from Latin as ‘To The Stars’. And it is indeed very impressive on the visuals and production front, especially with the stunning opener and its ‘space antenna’ scene. But once we get into the thick of the film’s story, with its space noir, whodunnit feel, it turns rather predictable, possibly hollow and scientifically ridiculous. An all-star cast couldn’t save this…

  • The Goldfinch

    September 27, 2019 - By 

    “I don’t need to tell you about loss”, Nicole Kidman’s grieving mother tells the grown-up Theodore (Ansel Elgort), her one-time foster guest when his mother was killed in a bombing. But actually, she does — she, or someone — anyone — needs to tell us something interesting about it, because no-one else is making the effort. Adapted from Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2013 novel by screenwriter Peter Stroughan and director John Crowley, The Goldfinch is a wounded bird in a box office tailspin, and you can see why. It is a silly, bitty and a little embarrassing, too desperate to be “about” things, too unrelaxed to…

  • Cascando @ Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival

    August 12, 2019 - By 

    It’s too far to see the expressions or to hear the reactions of the rowers gliding past as they observe twenty figures clad head to toe in black-hooded robes like Medieval monks, walking silently along the riverbank in single file. A penny too, for the thoughts of the two children, and their dog, on the opposing bank of  The River Erne. The ‘audience’ in this immersive piece of theatre is moving to the rhythms of Samuel Beckett’s radio play Cascando, headphones under hoods relaying this new interpretation by the award-winning Pan Pan Theatre. Created by Aedin Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn…

  • The Lion King

    July 25, 2019 - By 

    Real life looks boring. Rocks look boring. Trees look boring. Fluffy animals look boring. No-one opens their curtains in the morning and thinks wow, look at all that! This is a problem for The Lion King, one that sinks Disney’s photo-realistic reproduction almost from the word go. Jon Favreau’s nearly beat-for-beat prideland retread (new scenes expand the 1994 original’s 88 minute runtime) is a weird, alienating exercise in uncanny cynicism: the transparent cash-grabbing motive is depressing, but not nearly as depressing as having to actually watch the thing, which ticks over with the shiny time-killing futility of a high-res screensaver.…

  • Docs Ireland: Town of Strangers & When All Is Ruin Once Again

    June 28, 2019 - By 

    A weird coincidence treated Docs Ireland attendees to a pair of documentaries set in and around Gort, a small Galway town near the Clare border. Treasa O’Brien’s Town of Strangers is the more immediately charming of the two, an assemblage of residents who find themselves, through birth, accident or chance, sharing the town. O’Brien herself is a casual presence in the film: she was in the town trying to cast non-actors for a scripted feature, but found herself drawn towards the energy and personality of the people who showed up at auditions, and decided to stick around, living out of her van.…

  • Docs Ireland: Gaza

    June 24, 2019 - By 

    Is it strange to surf during a siege? The optics of a modern-day siege, and the visual poetics associated with the Gaza Strip, get scrambled and re-infused in Andrew McConnell and Garry Keane’s Gaza, closing night film of the Docs Ireland festival. Born out of McConnell’s “Gaza Surf Club” photography project, the film is a rare postcard from a desperate shoreline. “There is a barrier separating the people of Gaza from life itself”, muses a theatre performer, who provides poetic commentary on the struggle of those living in the ravaged Mediterranean enclave. Habitually designated as the world’s largest open-air prison, the Strip…

  • Docs Ireland: Diego Maradona

    June 21, 2019 - By 

    There are few football players on the planet that are more famous, or come with more infamy, than Argentina’s Diego Armando Maradona. When you throw this turbulent story into the hands of director Asif Kapadia and the team behind documentary classics Senna and Amy, you know you’re going to be in for an entertaining show. Diego Maradona achieves this right out of the gate, opening with blaring Italo-disco music and early-career party scenes. Primarily, the film gives us the two sides of Maradona; the unassuming and kind Diego; and the other, the wild, aggressive and philandering Maradona. In the early stages, you get a glimpse…

  • In Fabric

    June 21, 2019 - By 

    A haunted dress is the kind of premise that even Stephen King at the height of his cocaine period would struggle to make more than a short story out of, and a very silly one at that. But with In Fabric, Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy, Berberian Sound Studio) uses the conceit to create a deeply sensual and deranged experience that wraps itself around your brain and refuses to let go. As played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Shelia is a reserved and harried woman who yearns for some passion after separating from her husband. The day before a date, she’s convinced to buy…

  • Docs Ireland: The Inventor

    June 19, 2019 - By 

    An “invention” is, of course, not just a product you make, it’s a story you tell, a fancy you fashion. This linguistic slipperiness runs through Alex Gibney’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, his gripping critique of StartUpLand, a place pathologically allergic to plain speaking. Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) is one of the definitive portraits of corporate American group-think, flagging up the delusional market faith that would help decimate economies a couple of years later. The dangerous sway of belief and magical thinking are recurring preoccupations of the film-maker— his previous film was…

  • Docs Ireland: 2040

    June 14, 2019 - By 

    The screening of 2040 was packed with schoolchildren thanks to the involvement of Into Film, a Northern Irish charity focused on film as an educational tool, and it’s easy to see why Docs Ireland extended the invite. The film, presented and directed by Australia’s Damon Gameau, is a layperson’s guide to the causes of, and urgently needed possible solutions to, rapid climate breakdown, and a love letter to his daughter and the possible futures she will inhabit. There is a breezy pedagogical tone to the film, in which Gameau, via to-camera testimony, narration and slightly hokey visual aids, outlines the physical…