• Monos

    November 14, 2019 - By 

    Every so often, a movie comes along that completely rips up the rule book of filmmaking. Alejandro Landes’ (2011’s Porfirio) does so right from the beginning of Monos, with its unforgettable and surreal opening sequence of young protagonists playing football with blindfolds in some undisclosed, ethereal landscape in a Latin American mountain range, surrounded by clouds, as some sort of awareness drill,. The viewer’s attention is shoved, almost in a voyeuristic manner, into their bizarre, hedonistic, militaristic, yet juvenile world. The story progresses at a relentless pace into its premise and finale, leaving the viewer in awe at this wonderfully relevant, strangely realistic, yet ruthlessly brutal…

  • Woman at War

    May 3, 2019 - By 

    I don’t know if it’s the diet or something in their water supply, but Iceland seems incapable of creating bad films. And with Benedikt Erlingsson’s latest, after the wonderful Of Horses And Men, we may just have the finest film to come out of the island; one that is deftly timed, hugely relevant and, above all else, hugely entertaining. Woman At War follows the daily routine and double-life of Halla, a 50 year-old who is a choir master by day, and a dare-devil, militant environmental activist by night, waging a near one-woman war with Iceland’s aluminium industry, which she deems…

  • Tyrel

    March 11, 2019 - By 

    Like Sebastián Silva’s previous films, Tyrel walks the tightrope between psychological drama and out-and-out horror. Interpersonal conflicts come to the fore in strange, unpredictable ways. The tension is palpable, the level of cringe punishing. The film takes place over the course of one wild weekend. Tyler has been invited by his friend Johnny to drink with his childhood buddies. Being thrown into a new group of people can be anxiety-inducing enough, but once Tyler meets Johnny’s fratboy mates, it quickly becomes clear that he’s the only black man among them, adding an extra layer of unspoken tension. What makes Tyrel…

  • Alita: Battle Angel

    February 11, 2019 - By 

    Sometimes crappy films are interesting. Their failures flag up ludicrous studio decision-making, or a creative ego gone unchecked, or just a series of small misguided steps that, in retrospect, were so obviously the wrong path to go down. For those of us professionally curious about why stories do or do not work, these movies are instructive and shareable; the critics’ version of “Hey, smell this!”. But, really, most of the time, bad or boring movies are bad or boring in ways that are totally predictable. Watching them is an exercise in low expectations met. Alita: Battle Angel, Robert Rodriguez’s big-screen…

  • Vice

    January 22, 2019 - By 

    “What, uh, do we believe, sir?” a young Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld’s aide during the Nixon years, asks his boss. Rumsfeld, played by Steve Carell, laughs hysterically, blindsided by the naivety of the question. Matters of personal principles and ideology simply do not factor into Washington power games. It’s a central concern in Vice, the latest in Anchorman director Adam McKay’s swerve from knockabout man-boy comedy to polemical film-making, but it’s also a question the film desperately needed to ask itself. What does McKay believe? What moral vision is he trying to put on screen? What on earth is Vice…

  • Dublin Film Fest: First Reformed

    February 27, 2018 - By 

    Questions of faith are easy to ask yet hard to answer. In the modern parable First Reformed, Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) is experiencing a crisis of faith. A former military chaplain, Toller is grieving for a son who he encouraged to join the military. He is also coming to terms with his own mortality while serving his tiny congregation at First Reformed Chapel. As his despair deepens, he refuses to accept support from his colleague Esther (Victoria Hill) and superior Pastor Jeffers (Cedric Kyres). Instead, Toller begins to counsel Michael (Philip Ettinger), a radical environmentalist, and his pregnant wife Mary (Amanda…

  • Darkest Hour

    January 10, 2018 - By 

    Even while he’s having a cinematic moment, Churchill keeps his distance. Christopher Nolan weaponized celluloid machinery for the hyper-technical tension of Dunkirk, in which the politics of the coastal evacuation took place off screen, Kenneth Branagh’s naval captain standing in for the stiff upper lip of absent British authorities. Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill found Brian Cox’s wartime Prime Minister at the end of his tether on the eve of the Normandy invasion, tired and morose, struggling to maintain the brittle national morale. And now Joe Wright’s punchy Darkest Hour, the closest of the three to a traditional biopic, packing Gary Oldman in…

  • Song of Granite

    December 13, 2017 - By 

    A non-traditional perspective on a traditional Irish sean-nós singer, Song of Granite tells the story of Galway-born Joe Heaney through fragments and figments, snatches of song and poetry and time-jumping visions of Ireland and beyond. Pat Collins’ film is a carefully composed blend of dramatisation and documentary, light on biographical specifics but heavy on the sad, gentle rhythms of time and song. Cinematographer Richard Kendrick frames Joe’s childhood in the village of Carna, Connemara in glorious, pristine black and white, dramatisations of early 20th century rural Ireland rarely seen in cinema without the moral baggage of politics or poverty. There…

  • Kingsman: The Golden Circle

    September 20, 2017 - By 

    Golden shower, more like. The unpleasant, unrelenting Kingsman: The Golden Circle drenches viewers in water-thin spy adventuring for a demanding two hour twenty session, before zipping up and flipping the bird, leaving a faint funk hanging in the room. 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service, Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman working off Mark Millar’s comic, pursued its ‘Bond, but chav’ conceit with a comic bravado that was often ridiculous or annoying but at least showed some chutzpah, subverting Her Majesty’s Service niceties with its vein of laddish nastiness. Vaughn and Goldman return for the sequel, the former directing again, and the…

  • Wind River

    September 8, 2017 - By 

    Taylor Sheridan’s America is an exhausted, shrinking land. Land is a recurring theme for Sheridan, the screenwriter behind two of the best neo-Westerns of recent years, Sicario (directed by Denis Villeneuve) and Hell or High Water (directed by David McKenzie), the latter earning him an Academy nomination. Who owns the land, who takes it, who protects it and — most importantly — what kind of justice is available on it. Both films used frontier geography to tell stories about endings and broken systems, and the moral compromises of righteous avengers. For Wind River, Sheridan directs too. It’s not his directing debut — he did 2011 horror…