• BFF17: Waiting For You

    April 11, 2017 - By 

    Waiting For You is a passive title for a passive sort of film. NI actor Colin Morgan (the titular warlock in BBC’s weekend fantasy Merlin) makes his feature lead debut as a grieving lad investigating his late father’s secrets in the first film from Charles Garrad, production designer turned director. Garrad’s design background is obvious in the sunny chateaux aesthetics, but more than anything Waiting gives the impression of a film built mood-first, with a screenplay from Garrad and Hugh Stoddart that’s much too fuzzy around the edges. Paul (Morgan) is an architecture uni dropout working in a book store…

  • BFF17: Bad Day For The Cut

    April 10, 2017 - By 

    Closing the Belfast Film Festival with a shotgun blast worth of intense visceral thrills, Chris Baugh’s directorial debut is a revenge thriller with the same assured deadly aim of its lead character. Nigel O’Neill owns the screen as the farmer Donal, a quiet man content to live a small life with his mother. But when she’s murdered in a robbery gone wrong Donal sets out to the big city of Belfast in search of her killers. But both the search and the truth prove to be much more complicated than he could have ever foreseen. Screening to awed crowds at…

  • BFF17: Catfight

    April 11, 2017 - By 

    Rage, maternal loss and the sting of humiliation are accelerants in the bloodstream in Catfight, Onur Tukel’s face-thumping black comedy and satire on the unreality of violence. The match is lit when estranged college chums Veronica (Grey’s Anatomy‘s Sandra Oh) and Ashley (Anne Heche) bump into eachother at a fancy Manhattan party for the first time in years. In this alternate America (very near future?), the country is eyeing up another war in the Middle East, and Veronica and her husband, who runs a debris clean-up company, are in for a big payday if they land a juicy Pentagon contact.…

  • BFF17: All This Panic

    April 6, 2017 - By 

    Last year the Belfast Film Festival opened with Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang, a modern Turkish fairytale about a group of sisters dealing with the challenges of puberty in a small, conservative seaside village. This time around, up the road from the buzz of the Julian Barratt’s delirious Mindhorn, opening night gave us another intimately observed film about a coterie of young girls on the cusp of adulthood. The subjects of All This Panic, directed and shot by Jenny Gage and her cinematographer partner Thomas Betterton, are not subject to the same level of lock-and-key control and captivity, the six girls…

  • BFF17: Mad To Be Normal

    April 3, 2017 - By 

    There is a scene in Robert Mullan’s Mad To Be Normal, a biopic of the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing (played by David Tennant), in which the controversial figure is being interviewed on American radio during one of his promotional cross-Atlantic trips. While the room’s young, rapt audience look on, the broadcaster introduces Laing with a string of hyperbolic accolades, calling him an “acid Marxist” and, outrageously, a “white Martin Luther King”, whose revolutionary approach to treatment has enamoured the 60s counter-cultural spirit, and guaranteed him a spot on every dorm room bookcase in the United States. Eager for a…

  • Belfast Film Fest Blog: Day 9

    April 7, 2017 - By 

    It’s engines go for festival, and we’ll be running daily reactions, reviews and previews of upcoming screenings here on this regular blog. There’s going to be a lot to get through. Send us your film reactions at conor@thethinair.net, or tweet @thethinair – we want to hear what you’re seeing and what’s good. Day Nine – Friday 7th We’re closing in on the home stretch here. Expect more reviews and reflections over the weekend, including cinematographer Kirsten Johnson’s absorbing, reflective doc-collage Cameraperson and Breaking Bad‘s Betsy Brandt’s not-bad (that’s a lot of Bs) lead turn in missing-husband drama Alice in Motion, but for…

  • 21 (Pretty Much Random) Picks For The Belfast Film Festival

    March 29, 2017 - By 

    Time to hunt out your best pair of sitting-down trousers. The 17th Belfast Film Festival kicks off his week, running from Thursday 30th March to Sunday 9th April, boasting a packed programme of new cinema, both local and international, as well as special guests, live events, short films and classic screenings. There’s a lot going on, and any preview is going to be piece-meal. Ultimately, most of the fun will be encountering something totally unexpected once the lights go down. We’ve picked out a handful of screenings and events but encourage you to browse the full programme on their website. Here at The Thin Air we…