• The Book Of Life

    October 29, 2014 - By 

    Perhaps more than even Christmas and Halloween, the Mexican Dia de los Muertos (‘Day of the Dead’) is a holiday ripe for cinematic exploitation: it is, after all, a festival of colourful and gothic storytelling. Jorge Gutierrez, who has previously channeled his love for Mexican folklore into the award-winning El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera for Nickelodeon, pairs up with screenwriter Doug Langdale and uses the day as a backdrop for The Book of Life‘s imaginative story of childhood rivalry and feuding gods. It’s a moderately ambitious but highly charming fantasy-animation with a fun multi-level narrative. We open on…

  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

    October 16, 2014 - By 

    Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles combines two of the least appealing trends in current pop culture. The first is an unearned nostalgia for television cartoons that were already pretty ropey to begin with (only worsened by the recent dominance of the listicle). The second is the relentless grimification of pulpy comic book material for the PG-13/12A multiplex crowd. TMNT is an inexplicable and gormless film, which seems to have been made with some fictional demographic in mind. There’s none of the pulpy stylishness of the comics, or the light-hearted silliness of the television series. It’s a Nickelodeon production but I can only imagine children will be quickly bored by the unending humourlessness…

  • Ida

    October 13, 2014 - By 

    Ida is a modest but beautiful Polish-language buddy road movie from Pawel Pawlikowski, who returns to his homeland for a gorgeously vintage story of histories both personal and political. The sheltered Anne (Agata Trzebuchowska) is a novice nun in Sixties Poland, who has been living in the convent since she was abandoned as a child. Before she takes her vows, she is sent to meet her only living relative, the hard-drinking, cynical Aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a former prosecutor with the Stalinist regime, and get a taste of the secular world she is preparing to reject. Anne’s benign ignorance give way to a complex…

  • Dracula Untold

    October 8, 2014 - By 

    To local youngsters seeking a bankable trade in these uncertain times, might I suggest a specialism in medieval prop design? HBO’s Game of Thrones has had a good time of it transforming our castle-and-field vistas into a fantasy-realist Middle Ages, and the trend continues with Dracula Untold, feature debut of Dublin-born director Gary Shore. Filmed here over the last year and a half, the film echoes much of Thrones‘ production aesthetic: set in 15th-century Transylvania, it’s all heaving bodices, clashing steel, improbable dental hygiene and over-literal geography like ‘Broken Tooth Mountain’. It’s a very contemporary studio product, feeding on the vogue for origin stories and Universal’s plans for an Avengers-style cinematic universe for the various…

  • Gone Girl

    October 6, 2014 - By 

    Who knew extreme marital dysfunction could be such a riot? Adapted by Gillian Flynn from her best-selling novel, Gone Girl is a lurid and sickly funny evisceration of modern marriage. Flynn efficiently translates the book’s twisted psychologies and David Fincher, with his regular photography team and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ downbeat score, anchors the violent camp in his cold suburban surfaces. The film has the studied dread of Patricia Highsmith and the page-turning brio of a schlocky airport novel, and is a wicked satire on the ‘missing girl’ media phenomenon. It is also the first must-see studio film of the autumn. On…

  • 20000 Days on Earth

    September 22, 2014 - By 

    It’s important to understand that we all have our own biases. So before I discuss the new documentary 20000 Days On Earth, I feel it is important to establish that I’m a firm believer in Nick Cave and the strange, almost Lovecraftian shape his career has taken. From the apocalyptic noise of Birthday Party to last years pretty excellent  Bad Seed’s release Push The Sky Away and all of the films and novels in between, Cave has taken a journey filled with drugs, violence and religion which is just screaming to be explored cinematically. Anything that can give me more…

  • Pride

    September 22, 2014 - By 

    Pride works – and it really works – because it finds a way to perfectly be the kind of film you think it’s going to be while also offering surprising shades of feeling. The story of a real-life alliance between striking miners and gay and lesbian activists in Thatcherite Britain has a colourful, slightly cartoonish anti-Establishment bounce in its step, familiar from other British heart-warmers like Billy Elliot and The Boat That Rocked (with whom it shares Bill Nighy). But writer Stephen Beresford and Matthew Warchus are generous and compassionate in their treatment of characters and their dignity, producing a celebration of working-class solidarity and friendship…

  • Noble

    September 19, 2014 - By 

    Noble, the biopic of Irish humanitarian Christina Noble starring comedian Deidre O’Kane, feels a lot like a TV movie. First there’s the on-the-nose title, which reminds me of those movies you sometimes see on satellite channels, the ones that rip off blockbuster plots and give them over-literal titles like Space Danger or Future Saviour. The film may as well be called Saint Christina or The Pluck of the Irish. And second, there’s the intensely by-the-numbers approach it takes to Noble’s life story, as cribbed from memoirs like Bridge Across My Sorrows and Mama Tina. The film shifts chronologically between two stories: the ‘mis-lit’ material of her growing up in post-war Dublin squalor and ‘present day’…

  • The Guest

    September 8, 2014 - By 

    Interrupting the end-of-summer plainness like an ice bucket over the head is The Guest, a fun, nasty little slice of nuclear family devastation. It’s a tight, black domestic thriller from the seasoned horror partnership of Adam Winberg and Simon Barrett. Like the duo’s previous film, the rudimentary but spirited slasher You’re Next, it’s a genre piece about home invasion and family dysfunction. Here the threat isn’t a gang of animal-mask mercenaries, but a wolf in ship’s clothing. If the sheep shopped at Abercrombie and Finch. The Peterson family, still reeling from the death of son/brother Caleb in the Afghanistan conflict,…

  • What If

    September 2, 2014 - By 

    Hogwarts expatriate Daniel Radcliffe is the headliner here, but you might also recognise Zoe Kazan, one half of the meet-cute not-couple in Canadian-Irish production What If (retitled from The F-Word). She wrote Ruby Sparks (2009), a fun and acerbic satire of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope (an increasingly problematic term) in which she was the dreamt-up effervescent love interest for Paul Dano’s brooding, needy novelist. It is something of a pity, then, to see her taking on much more unchallenging genre material here. Adapted from T. J. Dawe and Michael Rinaldi’s Canadian play Toothpaste and Cigars, and directed by Michael Dowse (who did the winning The…