• Grand Theft Auo V (Rockstar Games, PC/PS4/Xbox 360)

    December 13, 2014 - By 

    Attributing the title of “Greatest Videogame Of All Time” is, of course, a purely subjective pursuit. Does the addendum “of all time” include all the games that shall ever be released in the future? Is it etched in stone, never to be challenged or usurped? Choosing which release deserves this award is entirely fruitless because such hyperbole is most often greeted with at best scepticism and at worst scorn. It is, however, an accolade that has been buzzing around GTA V since its initial release late last year, and while its levels of violence, bad language and generally salacious tone will certainly…

  • Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions (Sierra Entertainment, Multiformat)

    January 1, 2015 - By 

    This game should come adorned with a government health warning as it will surely turn the player into a drooling, blank-eyed husk of a human being. It will no doubt lead to the break-up of relationships and loss of jobs, and it will cause great physical displeasure to those who allow themselves to be sucked into its vortex. They will forego eating, sleeping and comfort breaks as they sit, legs numbed, controller in hand, boggling at the screen. Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions is the gaming equivalent of the videotape in The Ring, as once you have seen it you will…

  • Dragon Age: Inquisition (EA, Multiformat)

    January 1, 2015 - By 

    Videogames, as anyone knows, are a distraction. They offer a welcome excuse for avoiding sorting out that mounding pile of laundry or changing the blown bulb in the downstairs toilet. They provide respite from the tedium of everyday life and an opportunity to embody a fictional character in an entirely fantastical world. Consequently, David the biochemist will spend an average evening saddling up dragons and scorching riverside hamlets, grinning with glee as petrified villagers scream and run for safety. Brian from accounting will fill a random weekend ranking up on Shooty Shooty Bang Bang 3 so he can unlock a…

  • Panda Bear – Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper

    January 13, 2015 - By 

    Noah Lennox knows how to stir up a bit of intrigue. On his fifth album as Panda Bear, the Animal Collective co-conspirator has chosen a title that seems prophetic. Are we seeing the retirement of the Panda Bear avatar as we know it or is this simply a vague conceptual slant that the record seems to take? Lennox has said that the sequence of songs deals with the death of certain “character traits that are unnecessary or detrimental”, the dissolution of an identity, broken down until it is completely eradicated. In parts it’s reminiscent of The Terror by Flaming Lips,…

  • Taken 3

    January 9, 2015 - By 

    Producer/writer Luc Besson and director Olivier Megaton are filmmakers with a very specific set of skills, ones they have acquired over very long careers, and ones they apply liberally to Taken 3, Liam Neeson’s third round of familial brouhaha as Bryan Mills, retired spook and walking diplomatic incident. They can take the plainest of scenes, like two people in a room talking, or a basic freeway car chase, and turn them into impenetrable garbage. They can look at the reception to Taken 2, identify everything about it audiences disliked (the jumps in plot logic; the fun-sucking attention on Maggie Grace’s gormless suffering daughter routine; the softened…

  • The Theory of Everything

    January 8, 2015 - By 

    There are mercifully few equation montages in Theory of Everything, the hazy, heartfelt biopic of celebrity English astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. There is a scene early on where Stephen (Eddie Redmayne), an spiritedly disorganised graduate student searching out a thesis topic at 1960s Cambridge, seeks inspiration by scribbling out theorems on a blackboard, with a hugging, affectionate camera angle and an upbeat piano score. Even then, what strikes clearest is the jittery chalk transcription, a warning of the doom to come. It is one of the film’s few concessions to the tropes of the ‘damaged genius’ biopic: elsewhere, an enthused physics student explains black hole theory…

  • Birdman

    January 6, 2015 - By 

    There are many motifs that come to mind when discussing Alejandro González Iñárritu. A deft comedic hand is not really one of them. An overly long trip on the Expresso-Depresso bus to Interconnectivity of Life Boulevard with a brief detour through Ugly Face Of Humanity Avenue is more akin to what has come to expect from a man whose work included 21 Grams, Amores Perros and Babel. His films are often negative to a fault, as is the case with his previous effort, Buitiful, which painted a portrait so devoid of any kind of salvation that you lost all sympathy…

  • Tokyo Godfathers: A Hunky Dory Christmas

    December 22, 2014 - By 

    Christmas films are a tough nut to crack, if you’ll pardon the pun. They require an almost faultless balance of pathos and sentimentality, lest we forget that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is about the failure of common man and suicide as well as angels attaining wings. If you go too far in one direction, you can end with a film which seems insincere, idiotic and full of saccharine trust. The inverse of that is you end up with a nasty, hateful film which just sneers at the audience. Every now and then, a film gets the balance just right; Satoshi…

  • The Cyclist – Flourish

    December 17, 2014 - By 

    Having set out his stall with last year’s Bones In Motion LP, Derry native The Cyclist (Andrew Morrison) has returned with another full-length example of what he very aptly describes as ‘tape throb,’ a boundary-defying genre envisioned as a warmer approach to making electronica; crackling, fluid-like but with danceable overtones. Flourish, Morrison’s second album and his first through All City Records, extends to the listener a slightly more evolved tape throb mantra of lo-fi, compounded and naturally rich electronica than that of Bones In Motion; in this latest instance for example, Morrison has included just seven tracks in comparison to…

  • Pigeon & Plum @ Black Box, Belfast

    December 15, 2014 - By 

    It’s Christmas time! That can mean only one thing: PIGEO… Wait, no: family, the birth of baby Jesus and Santa. Okay, the festive season means many, many things but for those of us in the know – namely those of us based in Belfast – it’s time for our favourite vaudeville show, Pigeon & Plum. As I walk into the Black Box I’m instantly taken aback by the astounding transformation it has undergone. It looks like a completely different venue. Drenched in decadence with red velvet and gold fringing, from big details like the antique frame that towers over the…