• Fifty Shades Freed

    February 14, 2018 - By 

    Three Valentine’s Days later, it’s finally over. Jamie Dornan has been humiliated and audiences have been punished, but by this point you know what you’re in for. In order to get anything from Fifty Shades Freed, the climax to this improbable trilogy, you have to just hold up your hands and submit. Christian Grey gets his happy ending. The rest of us will have to get our rocks off elsewhere. Picking off where Darker left off, the soap opera romance is in full swing. There’s still the odd trip to the Red Room, sure, but Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) and Christian (Dornan)…

  • The 15.17 To Paris

    February 14, 2018 - By 

    On 21 August 2015, on a cross-border train from Amsterdam to Paris, a Moroccan man named Ayoub El Khazzan emerged from a toilet cubicle shirtless, an AKM assault rifle in his hands. He shot a passenger who tried to intervene and then went to open fire on the carriage, but the weapon jammed, allowing three young American men to rush El Khazzan and prevent further violence. Afterwards Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone, two of whom were off-duty members of the U.S. Armed Services, received the Legion of Honour, the highest decoration of the French Republic. Back home, Stone earned a…

  • Franz Ferdinand @ Olympia Theatre, Dublin

    February 13, 2018 - By 

    You get the impression Alex Kapranos enjoys this kind of thing. The frontman strutted on stage, fully decked out in signature skinny suit and tie, looking like he was born there. Sporting a newly bleached quiff and rockstar pout, the Scot had a heavy whiff of Bill Nighy’s character in Love Actually about him. There were hips thrusts; there were finger wags; there were even Eddie Van Halen style guitar jumps. And like the aforementioned Nighy, you can’t help but be endeared by his performance. Before the Dublin crowd got this show of old school entertainment, there were some young…

  • Brigid Mae Power – The Two Worlds

    February 13, 2018 - By 

      We’re all guilty of living between two worlds. Personal and private, work and leisure, pre “this” and post “that” comprise just a few. God forbid should they ever crossover; most of us fight losing battles to keep them apart, whether the consequences are trivial or something much darker. Brigid Mae Power does not seem to be such a person though. The Galway based singer-songwriter runs at her demons head-on throughout her third full length album The Two Worlds, and the fallout of such a collision is a staggering beauty to behold. Under the support of the #MeToo movement, Power recently…

  • Journey’s End

    February 12, 2018 - By 

    On the 100 year anniversary of the end of The First World War, director Saul Dibb (Suite Francaise) and writer Simon Reade (Private Peaceful) have adapted R.C. Sheriff’s 1928 play, based on his real-life experiences, to serve as a timely, gut-punch of a reminder of the horrors of this dark period in our history. And with an exceptional British cast and an absolutely astoundingly detailed production, Journey’s End is a surefire war classic. Set during the last year of the war in 1918, the story centres around British infantry unit C-company, as they make their way to the frontline trenches in…

  • Glory (Slava)

    February 12, 2018 - By 

    Glory (Slava) is a satire about the hypocrisies of power and class within contemporary Bulgarian society. Like the Russian-made watch of the title, this film has been constructed with purpose. The watch keeps time; the film tells a modern parable about a small act of thoughtlessness and its consequences. Solitary railway worker Tzanko (Stefan Denolyubov) comes across a mysterious pile of cash on train tracks. He reports his find to the authorities. Tzanko is honest but also isolated, disliked by his colleagues and shown little kindness by his peers. The Ministry of Transport’s head of public relations Julia Staykova (Margita Gosheva) regards…

  • British Sea Power @ Limelight 2, Belfast

    February 11, 2018 - By 

    Despite emerging at a time when the supposed cool of The Strokes and The Libertines reigned supreme, British Sea Power have successfully outlived most of their contemporaries to become a strange sort of cult British national treasure, concerned less with drugs and parties than with books and nature – song lyrics cover such topics as collapsing Antarctic shelves and 1953 floods, and the band once even bagged an appearance on Countryfile. Five years since they last graced Irish shores, BSP’s famously eccentric live show makes a long overdue return. After a reverb-drenched opening set from Belfast dream-pop duo MMODE, BSP…

  • MGMT – Little Dark Age

    February 10, 2018 - By 

    MGMT are back, a decade after their acclaimed debut Oracular Spectacular was released, and five years after their convoluted self-titled made its way onto the airwaves. After their initial success, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser barrel rolled into a neo-psychedelic space that alienated the majority of their followers. This, of course, would have been a respectable, admirable decision from the duo had they produced something half-decent in that case. No one expected 2010’s Congratulations, an album that left the fans who revelled in the hooks and fist-pumps of ‘Kids’ and ‘Time To Pretend’ abandoned in a pit of half-baked, self-indulgence that aspired…

  • Franz Ferdinand  – Always Ascending

    February 9, 2018 - By 

    After the Glasgow School of Art was severely damaged by fire in 2014, it was argued that the extensive coverage afforded to this incident was greater than the actual public interest in the Mackintosh-designed institution itself. Some bands, burdened by instant debut success, similarly linger long in the memory of music critics long after the record-buying public has moved on. Enter one-time art school alumni Franz Ferdinand, who have managed to side-step the indie landfill of the mid-noughties by releasing five solid albums (six if we’re including the 2015 collaboration with Sparks) of arch art-pop. And still, they command considerable…

  • Efrim Menuck – Pissing Stars

    February 8, 2018 - By 

    Montreal’s Efrim Menuck casts a long, deep shadow over contemporary experimental rock music. If you need a demonstration of that fact, listen to the first three Godspeed You! Black Emperor albums and get good and lost in them for a while. Separate to this, his work with Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra is a notable cut above many of his peers. Every album he’s touched is coated in his fingerprints. It’s surprising then, given his longevity and influence, that he has only two solo efforts. The second of which he has just released after a seven-year gap. Pissing Stars…