• Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise

    November 6, 2016 - By 

    Experimentation has never frightened Mark Cousins. He doesn’t cling to form and narrative the Eway many filmmakers and most of us mere mortals do, instead he challenges the medium and the audience. In Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise he has created a kaleidoscopic visual history of the atomic age that is part music video, part documentary, part avant-garde film, part dream and part nightmare. Accompanied by an illuminating and introspective score from Mogwai, that gives an even greater resonance to the film’s images, the result is pure cinema. Created in 2015 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the bombings…

  • Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World

    October 25, 2016 - By 

    The great Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo) is back doing what he does best – documentary filmmaking. With Lo and Behold, his inquisitive eye is cast over the world of the internet; its past, present and future, with highly informative and entertaining results. The opening shot is met by the unmistakable voice of the man himself, as he introduces one of the original pioneers of the internet, Leonard Kleinrock. He guides us into a perfectly recreated and preserved room, from which the first internet message was sent in 1969, and informs the viewer, with much gusto, as to what this message was.…

  • The Blue Room

    September 26, 2016 - By 

    Best known for his performances in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Quantum of Solace and Venus in Fur, Mathieu Amalric steps behind the camera to adapt Georges Simenon’s novel of the same name. The story of an extra-marital affair that leads to a double murder investigation, The Blue Room is an immaculately crafted, neo-noir character study, both haunting and illuminating in equal measure. The film begins with the two lovers, Julien and Esther, naked in bed. Immediately there is a disjuncture between sound and image as the audience hears them have sex, but never sees it. Only the eponymous…

  • Mom and Me

    August 24, 2016 - By 

    Laois-born Ken Wardrop has an Irishman’s fascination with mothers. His graduate film for Dun Laoghaire’s IADT, Undressing My Mother, was a frank and physically candid portrait of the Wardrop matriarch, glimpses of the widowed farmer’s wife’s bare flesh set to her ruminations on body, family and her late marriage. His first feature documentary, 2009’s His & Hers, profiled girls and women of all ages from the Irish Midlands, their testimonies tracing the arc of womanhood from teenage stress to last-call loneliness. For his latest doc, Mom and Me, Wardrop heads across the water to Oklahoma’s wide flats, bringing men into his frame for a look at Mama’s Boy Okies…

  • Star Trek Beyond

    July 23, 2016 - By 

    With Star Wars dominating the cultural agenda again, it’s been uncertain times for Star Trek fans. Whereas George Lucas’ space saga has always been a perennial favourite, tapping into subsequent generations, and always being somehow cool, Trek has never been particularly fashionable, with its themes of philosophy, exploration, and understanding seeming fairly lumpy and worthy in the face of Jedi mysticism, lightsaber duels, and space dogfights. JJ Abrams’ 2009 reboot upped the excitement factor, ushered in a younger crew, and tapped into a new audience, but along the way, alienated a legion of older fans who felt that the essence…

  • Chevalier

    July 22, 2016 - By 

    Dick size, both metaphorical and literal, is the subject of Greek auteur Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier, a pristine satire on machismo and the barely coded competition that animates how men relate to eachother. A group of six men, still looking spry in their thirties, forties and beyond, are vacationing on a luxury private yacht in the Aegean Sea, a get-together organised by the eldest and most assertively paternal among them, nicknamed The Doc (Yiorgos Kendros). As their sojourn draws to a close, they decide to play a game to determine which of them is ‘The Best in General’, an extended series of tests and random…

  • Maggie’s Plan

    July 20, 2016 - By 

    “So, is there a plan?” wonders a skeptical teen in the backseat of a cramped car on the school run. With these adults, it’s hard to know. Questions of intentions, schemes and the invisible hand of fate animate Rebecca Miller’s witty new comedy Maggie’s Plan, a charming three-hander with wonderful turns from Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore as inter-linked lovers whose hearts can’t seem to sit still. Gerwig dials down the quirk as the titular Maggie, a single New Yorker eager to take control of her life. She still delivers lines with that air of playful, slightly affected,…

  • The Conjuring 2

    June 21, 2016 - By 

    Contrary to totally-legit marketing stories about priests stationed at screenings, ready to deliver spiritual counsel to distressed moviegoers, The Conjuring 2 is not all that frightening. It is, however, probably the most entertaining big-studio horror movie of the past five years. Not because of the scares, but because of how relaxed it is around those scares. With two Insidious‘ and the first Conjuring under his belt, James Wan is confident enough not to just serve up the jump-scare hard sell that has become the default mode for multiplex horror. The film begins with a nice bait-and-switch: Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga reprising their…

  • The Nice Guys

    June 14, 2016 - By 

    These guys aren’t really that nice. That’s the joke, I guess, but it’s hardly their fault. No-one’s particularly congenial in this 70s L. A. smogscape, where even the birds are giving up and dropping out of the sky. The Nice Guys, written and directed by Shane Black, Hollywood’s go-to guy for snappy, emotionally wounded buddy comedies, is smeared with the film-maker’s fingerprints. Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are a mismatched pair of low-level private investigators. There’s a dead wife, quipy banter, a lot of boozing, a stray Christmas jingle and at its centre two figures of bruised, broken masculinity, struggling…

  • X-Men: Apocalypse

    May 23, 2016 - By 

    Marvel’s X-Men comics sometimes led with a cheeky fake-out to tease the reader. We open in media res, our mutant heroes pitched in desperate battle against some foe. They’re battered and bruised. They’ve suffered casualties. And right before the moment of defeat, when all is seemingly lost, the scene fades away, leaving the super-powered faculty panting in an empty steel-blue hangar. It’s the Danger Room, the mansion’s holographic training facility. Cyclops, Iceman and co. were never in danger; the stakes weren’t real. X-Men: Apocalypse, the third film in the franchise’s origin reboot, is one long Danger Room scenario, a frictionless…