• Galway Film Fleadh: A Ghost Story

    July 21, 2017 - By 

    The last film David Lowery wrote and directed, 2013’s Southern crime mood piece Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, caught some critical flak for its obvious debts to Terrence Malick’s whispery, wheat-swaying-in-the-sun photography. More than one review noted its promise, but emphasized Lowery’s need to find his own voice. Four years later, after a stint at Disney directing the live-action Pete’s Dragon, Lowery is back in the auteurish game, with a film seemingly designed to answer the charge of unoriginality. Even by A24’s idiosyncratic standards, A Ghost Story is a strange, alienating and singular piece of cinema. To give Lowery his due,…

  • Dunkirk

    July 20, 2017 - By 

    Dunkirk, one of the summer’s most hyped and star-strewn aspiring blockbusters, is about that iconic crossroads moment of the early Second World War: the attempted evacuation in 1940 of nearly half a million British, French and Belgian soldiers from the titular French beach. Cut off from air support, surrounded by the German army, bombed to breaking point by the Luftwaffe – and with the safe haven of Dover less than thirty miles away – the Allies face catastrophe. A desperate evacuation strategy is mounted over land, sea and air that enlists not only the Allied forces but also British civilians…

  • Galway Film Fleadh: Maudie

    July 19, 2017 - By 

    The real-life tale of an arthritic misunderstood woman who finds meaning and recognition through art, Maudie could’ve have easily fallen victim to award-baiting faux-sensitivity. But much like the paintings produced by Nova Scotia artist Maud Lewis (1903–1970), now celebrated as one of Canada’s most famous folk artists, the biopic remains bright, simple, optimistic and a little childish. Dublin-born director Aisling Walsh (Song for a Raggy Boy, The Daisy Chain and numerous TV projects such as Dylan Thomas feature A Poet in New York) keeps a firm hand on Lesley Crewe’s script, which traces Lewis’ marriage, fame and eventual illness. Crewe,…

  • The Graduate

    July 18, 2017 - By 

    Fifty years have passed since the original release of The Graduate, the film that launched Dustin Hoffman as a star, innovated the pop music movie soundtrack and confirmed Mike Nichols’ genius with 1967’s Best Director Oscar. The highest grossing film at the U.S. box office that year, its success helped to usher in a new wave of young Hollywood filmmakers and the most creative decade in American cinema history followed during the 1970s. While the film’s historical cinematic significance is without dispute, The Graduate remains a thoroughly modern film – in both its themes and style – that demands to…

  • War for the Planet of the Apes

    July 17, 2017 - By 

    Like the cinematic equivalent of the ‘evolution of man’ graphic, each installment of the Planet of the Apes prequels has stood that bit taller than the last in terms of scope and ambition, as the franchise inches closer to the simian supremacy of Charlton Heston’s sixties space odyssey. 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes remains a stunning achievement in summer film-making, thanks to its expectation-defying mix of tragic fraternal conflict, lush botanic texture and a totally compelling hero. On Andy Serkis’ conflicted, motion-captured face was writ large the practical limits of Caesar’s longed-for apetopia and its non-violent covenant.…

  • Galway Film Fleadh: The Big Sick

    July 14, 2017 - By 

    Pakistani-American comic Kumail Nanjiani and writer Emily V. Gordon, married co-hosts of popular podcast ‘The Indoor Kids’, have mined the dramatic beginning of their real-life relationship for the wonderfully large-hearted and funny The Big Sick. Directed by Michael Showalter (Wet Hot American Summer, They Came Together) and produced by Judd Apatow, it’s the big, crowd-pleasing romance of the summer and a welcome return to form for the Hollywood rom-com. Kumail (Silicon Valley) plays a less successful version of himself, a Chicago comic driving an Uber on the side and doing 5 minute bits at the local comedy club, angling, alongside his friends Bo Burnham and Aidy Bryant (Saturday Night Live), for…

  • Spider-Man: Homecoming

    July 14, 2017 - By 

    ‘The world’s changing’, announces Michael Keaton’s Vulture, Spider-Man: Homecoming’s feather-ruffed villain, ‘and we have to change with it’. Change is the name of the game for the web-slinger’s third modern cinematic run, following Tobey Maguire’s and, less successfully, Andrew Garfield’s time in the red and blue undies. Adrian Toomes (Keaton) is speaking as a resentful civilian caught up in the skyscraper debris of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a metal-scrapper by trade, forced to make a living scurrying in the damage left by Stark and co. (when his crew are pushed off their clean-up gig by the drily-titled, Stark-sponsored Department of Damage Control, it’s the…

  • Twice Shy

    July 11, 2017 - By 

    The pressure on so-called ‘issue’ films to ‘start a conversation’, as the journo cliche goes, or, at least, to contribute to existing dialogue, can feel like an unfair burden. Good films are more nuanced than the message we would like to hear from them, and it’s hard to predict what kind of reactions they might provoke from wider audiences. Also, more crucially, meaningful conversations are just plain difficult things to have. To its credit, Irish indie Twice Shy, the second feature from Tipperary-born Tom Ryan, acknowledges this difficulty, and places the troubles of its characters ahead of its eye-catching subject…

  • The House

    July 7, 2017 - By 

    You could be forgiven for getting halfway through The House and be ready for walking out the door. But if you weather the initial shitstorm of writer/director Andrew Jay Cohen’s (Bad Neighbours) latest slapstick/screwball comedy, then it might well pay off for you. The filmmaker has somehow managed to make a film of two, glaringly different halves, as there are some big laughs to be had when the absurdity ratchets up in the last 45 minutes and the comedic violence takes over from the ‘jokes’. Will Ferrell (Anchorman) and Amy Poehler (Parks and Recreation) play a married couple in a well-to-do suburban estate in the US. After an ill-advised…

  • Risk

    July 2, 2017 - By 

    Julian Assange has to be one of the most divisive and controversial figures of modern times. With documentary filmmaker, Laura Poitras’ (Citizenfour) latest, covering the last 6 years of his time running Wikileaks, you’re likely to think a little less of him. There is no doubt that the man is exceptionally brave and principled but what Poitras uncovers is a planet-sized ego and a certain naivety, at least initially, as to what he was getting mixed up in. Risk begins in 2011 when Assange and Wikileaks’ notoriety went into overdrive after their huge cache of leaks concerning the US government…