• Grief Is The Thing With Feathers (O’Reilly Theatre, Dublin)

    April 2, 2018 - By 

    Grief is the thing with feathers, and Cillian Murphy is the thing with talent. Based on the poetry/prose book of the same name by Max Porter, Grief Is The Thing With Feathers breathes life into death, centring around Dad (Cillian Murphy), The Boys (Taighen O’Callaghan, Felix Warren) and Mum (Hattie Morahan). Murphy began his acting career in director Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs and is back collaborating with him once again in Grief. The playwright and director, also known for Ballyturk and Mistermen, has adapted the work into an enthralling and heart-wrenching experience for the audience. The set consists of a simple apartment filled…

  • Mount Eerie – Now Only

    April 4, 2018 - By 

    You did not walk with me Of late to the hill-top tree By the gated ways, As in earlier days; You were weak and lame, So you never came, And I went alone, and I did not mind, Not thinking of you as left behind. I walked up there to-day Just in the former way; Surveyed around The familiar ground By myself again: What difference, then? Only that underlying sense Of the look of a room on returning thence.  – Thomas Hardy In July of 2016, musician Geneviève Castrée died. She was survived by husband Phil Elverum and her infant…

  • Guided by Voices – Space Gun

    April 2, 2018 - By 

      As if Guided by Voices weren’t prolific enough in their ’90s heyday, Robert Pollard has amped things up considerably in the 2010s. When that classic ’90s lineup reunited earlier this decade, they remarkably pumped out six new albums within a mere two and a half year period, while the current reboot of the 1997-2004 Doug Gillard era produced two last year, including sprawling double album August by Cake. A wealth of new material from a band we once thought were gone for good is something to celebrate, but there’s been an undeniable sense since 2012 that they’ve been spreading…

  • Love, Simon

    April 2, 2018 - By 

    Love, Simon is a queer teen drama that wants you to know up front it’s sorry for being so, well, straight. Loosely adapted from Becky Albertalli’s 2015 novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, the film opens with a voiceover from Simon Spier (Nick Robinson), providing a mea culpa for his boring, stable life, the kind of intensely comfortable existence accepted as default by studio teenage flicks. Simon lives in a gorgeous house with his younger sister and hot parents (Jennifer Garner and Transformers’ Josh Duhamel). He gives his happy, handsome friends rides to school in the morning, picking up iced lattes…

  • Young Fathers – Cocoa Sugar

    April 2, 2018 - By 

    Words are hard. Try as we might as we attempt to translate thoughts into words, we inevitably truncate the infinite. We’ve spent millennia desperately trying to communicate with one another the depth and breadth of the things we feel and how external stimuli affect us. Think of all the experiences you’ve had and everything you’ve ever felt and then wonder if you’ve ever been able to truly express yourself to another without losing some level of definition. That’s the reason behind the elation of discovering a new metaphor. Occasionally though, you’re faced with an experience or piece of art whose…

  • Young Fathers @ The Academy, Dublin

    March 30, 2018 - By 

    To describe Dublin’s Academy as packed would be an understatement. Bodies have been piling in in rapid succession after a slow trickling start. The main floor is shoulder to should with sweating teeming masses barely able to contain their anticipation for the Scottish hip-hop trio Young Fathers‘ arrival. The crowd tonight is beyond hyped up. There’s an intense positivity within all the anticipation that fuel some of the night’s most powerful moments. Thirty minutes after the opening DJ finishes his surprisingly enjoyable set of chipmunk soul and reggae cuts, the house lights dim and stage beams with white light. Three…

  • Ready Player One

    March 28, 2018 - By 

    After Steven Spielberg changed the movie world with Jaws in 1975, he bought a cavernous Beverley Hills home and filled it with arcade machines. Newly minted and paranoid, the director also installed an elaborate security system, and refused to accept deliveries at the door. Hollywood’s hottest director and his walled-off playpen. Ready Player One is a film built for Spielberg The Younger, from Spielberg The Elder, a cautionary celebration of pop culture toy islands, a messy, whizzing trip into the lens-flare fantasies of the geek id. In Ready Player One, ‘the OASIS’ is the biggest toy-box ever invented. A giant virtual reality and intensely lucrative…

  • A Wrinkle in Time

    March 28, 2018 - By 

    In ‘Anthem’ Leonard Cohen sang ‘there is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.’ These lines have been adopted as an inspirational saying by many but they also reflect the idea that it is often the imperfections that make an object beautiful. Perhaps, the same can be said about the flaws in Disney’s latest big budget children’s film A Wrinkle in Time. Teenage Meg Murray (Storm Reid) is struggling following her scientist father’s disappearance four years earlier. Isolated and lonely, Meg’s grief has made as a social outcast who is out of sync with her peers and losing…

  • Yo La Tengo – There’s a Riot Going On

    March 27, 2018 - By 

    Even though it’s a been a good five years since the last Yo La Tengo album proper – discounting 2015’s primarily covers and reworks-based Stuff Like That There – the band’s new album came about more by accident than design. Forced by software updates and the general onward march of technology to upgrade their home recording equipment, new material began to grow out of the practice room jam sessions that developed in order to enable bassist James McNew to learn how to use this new kit. Using these recordings as well as older snippets from over the past decade, the…

  • Unsane

    March 23, 2018 - By 

    Before last year’s criminally ignored The Florida Project, Sean Baker made headlines by shooting 2015 feature Tangerine on iPhone gear (the director used 3 different iPhone 5s). Indie authenticity suited the low-key story of pair of transgendered prostitutes on the Sunset Strip, capturing the forced street intimacy and, when tilted skywards, the expansive, beautifully festive colouring of one-crazy-night Los Angeles. Now Steven Soderbergh, no stranger to doing things his own way, has shot his new film Unsane with an iPhone rig (iPhone 7 Plus in 4K, with the app FiLMiC Pro). No doubt it helped keep some costs down — again, Soderbergh…