• Eden

    July 27, 2015 - By 

    Eden is a cautionary tale based on the life of director Mia Hansen-Love’s brother Sven and shows the dizzying highs and soul-destroying lows of Paul (Felix de Givry) and his uniformly charmless friends in the 90s Garage House scene in Paris. Paul is really only the protagonist through the sheer amount of time we spend with him. He sort of bubbles up through the ranks through sheer ubiquity, his friends, similar pouters in knitwear, seem no more or less attractive than he does. We’re just stuck with him for two and a half hours. This, perversely, is one of the…

  • May B @ Samuel Beckett Happy Days Festival

    July 27, 2015 - By 

    Ten spectral figures, white-faced, in white night-clothes come slowly onto the stage. They stand stock-still and silent in the dim half-light. Minutes pass. Schubert’s plaintive Deer Leiermann from the Winterreise song circle accompanies their numb vigil. A shrill whistle-blast signals slow shuffling. Another, more urgent, commands greater synchronized movement. The figures draw into a circle and grunt in unison. A tighter circle, more grunting. Walking mechanically to and fro in step, panting as one. Walking, panting and grunting rhythmically as one. Suddenly as one they face the audience. The one staring at the other in powerful symbiosis.  “Fini, c’est fini,”…

  • Ant-Man

    July 23, 2015 - By 

    Ant-Man is a small guy but he comes with a lot of baggage. With the high-profile mid-production replacement of Edgar Wright, a stylistically idiosyncratic film-maker with cult buzz, with Yes Man director Peyton Redd, much of the nerdtariat has already pegged Ant-Man as a test case for the limits of auteurism in the Marvel factory. And the pint-sized adventures of Scott Lang, Paul Rudd’s incredible shrinking superhero and the latest addition to the Avengers fringes, definitely invites this perspective. The film is immediately readable as a kind of Rorschach test, with tone, story and character work that stretches from inspired to…

  • Lovers: Winners and Losers @ The Everyman Theatre, Cork

    July 21, 2015 - By 

    Lovers: Winners & Losers has enjoyed a fantastic run at Cork’s Everyman Theatre throughout the month of July. Friel’s play, written and set in 1967 tells the stories of two Irish couples. Separated into separate acts, Friel’s work even in a contemporary setting still resonates with the audience and Julie Kelleher’s first production as Artistic Director of the Everyman has been a great success. Casting the likes of Ciaran Bermingham, Timmy Creed, Judy Donovan, Antoinette Hilliard, Fionula Linehan, and Mary-Lou McCarthy; their portrayal of the characters bring each to life full of vibrant humour and pathos. Mary-Lou McCarthy (Maggie) and Timmy…

  • Longitude 2015

    July 21, 2015 - By 

    Friday It wouldn’t be a festival without the uncertainty in the weather conditions, and as they shifted from heavy rain to beaming sunshine and back three times an hour, there was still a large turnout for the early opening time as buses pulled up coming from all across Ireland. Day One of Longitude had started. While the showers may have been scattered, the talent was constantly on show across the four stages, and as Wyvern Lingo opens the main stage, Haelos set up on the Whelan’s stage. A three-piece electronic band whose numbers double in the live environment with soothing…

  • Once @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    July 17, 2015 - By 

    Nearly two and a half years after its Dublin premiere, the wildly successful Once returns to Ireland for a run unto itself.  When the show made its European debut in February 2013, the Dublin-set musical premiered at the Gaiety for a short engagement before shipping out to its West End settlements for a two-year run where it added Olivier Awards to its Tony Accolades.  Now Landmark Productions returns the show for the summer season, performed exclusively at Dublin’s Olympia, and the fans it won abroad join new followers from its hometown in what’s sure to become a sellout. Walking into…

  • Wilco – Star Wars

    July 17, 2015 - By 

    “Why release an album this way and why make it free? Well, the biggest reason, and I’m not sure we even need any others, is that it felt like it would be fun. What’s more fun than a surprise?” So posited the ever quizzical Jeff Tweedy on Wilco’s Facebook page earlier tonight, just when pretty much every Wilco aficionado (especially those of us brushing our teeth before bed) was positively not expecting Wilco’s first studio album in four years to be let loose onto the internet for free. Now, rather than answer his concluding rhetorical question (let’s face it, there’s plenty…

  • Refused – Freedom

    July 17, 2015 - By 

    Refused are fucking alive. Or so we’re told. One of the most powerful, vital and cathartic hardcore bands of the nineties, the Swedish four-piece created an unmatched legacy by blazing a trail of fearless musical fusion, incandescendent agitprop and a vast palette of cultural influences and reference points, from fine art to the New Romantics, as best encapsulated in seminal album ‘The Shape of Punk to Come’. Then, at the height of their potency and white-hot rage, they disbanded in a storm of shit and failure, and instructed press outlets to delete reviews, promo pics on file, etc. It was…

  • St. Vincent @ The Opera House, Cork

    July 15, 2015 - By 

    It’s a quiet, damp Monday evening in Cork City when St Vincent aka Annie Clark and her merry crew roll into town with their highly stylised, bombastic stage show, however the Texan act very quickly brighten up the hearts and imaginations of their crowd. First off, Cork natives Young Wonder warm up the audience with their indie-electronica hybrid. Despite the band’s best efforts to engage their audience – the phrase ‘make some noise!’ is thrown about far too often for such a short set – the crowd is very much there for St Vincent and St Vincent alone. Closing with…

  • St. Vincent w/ Little Green Cars @ The Big Top, Galway

    July 16, 2015 - By 

    Tonight saw the Galway International Arts Festival Big Top host its first event of the season with the sheer spectacle of Texan powerhouse St. Vincent and support from the always-charming Little Green Cars. The tent by the river has already filled suitably by the time Little Green Cars take to the stage and there’s an immediate sense that the audience is more than willing to be drawn further in by the brutally honest and heartfelt tracks from the band’s 2013 debut LP Absolute Zero and a healthy sprinkling of equally emotive new ones, one of which wouldn’t sound out of…