• Flatliners

    October 12, 2017 - By 

    Right from the get-go, as the opening title and credits roll and the messy CGI effects and warbling audio bites of people talking about near-death experiences nauseatingly assault your senses, you get a sinking feeling that director Niels Arden Oplev (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) and writer Ben Ripley (Source Code) have created something terrible. Lo and behold, this new take on the 90s non-classic Flatliners will most certainly join the ever-expanding ranks of atrocious remakes that the Hollywood conveyor belt has, in recent times, been churning out with merciless efficiency. Flatliners tells the story of a group of…

  • The LEGO Ninjago Movie

    October 10, 2017 - By 

    While not quite as surefooted as previous cinematic LEGO outings, this family-friendly romp still offers a colourful dose of inspired lunacy. From the outset, it is important to acknowledge that the Ninjago franchise, albeit hugely popular in its minifigure form, is not as appealing as the Batman universe, yet that in itself liberates the filmmakers to try something a little different. At no point does this addition to the LEGO roster claim to be as subversive or slyly satirical as this year’s hilarious puncturing of the Bruce Wayne mythos nor as a piece of animation does it set out to…

  • The Mountain Between Us

    October 5, 2017 - By 

    The Mountain Between Us, a disaster-romance directed by Hany Abu-Assad and starring Idris Elba and Kate Winslet, is immediately identifiable as a book adaptation (Charles Martin’s 2010 novel). It feels like a lurid-but-chaste paperback you’d find at a train station reading desk, or on your mum’s bedside cabinet. The cover image would be two handsome lovers, wrapped in ski gear, snuggled up against the warm glow of a cabin fire. In other words, the impression here is not of danger, or life-in-the-balance peril. The only real tension is wondering how quickly they’re going to bang. The mountain, in case you…

  • The Work

    September 27, 2017 - By 

    The Work, an intimate observational documentary from Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous, features the closest thing to real-life exorcisms you might ever see. In a grey cinder block room in California’s Folsom State Prison, a maximum security jailhouse made famous by Johnny Cash’s blues, small pockets of men sit on fold-up chairs, unspooling their deepest, most complicated feelings. One convict is desperate to let down his guard and mourn his sister. His group form a circle and coach him on breathing and posture, as he stands silent, tense, diving inside to retrieve the pain. Something rumbles up his chest and…

  • Maze

    September 22, 2017 - By 

    Courting controversy is something that filmmakers have to be very wary of in this day and age, and for writer/director Stephen Burke (Happy Ever Afters) and producer Brendan J. Byrne (Bomb Squad Men), there is no escaping it when dealing with as delicate a subject as the true story of the mass breakout of Provisional IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland from one of Europe’s most secure prisons. But what the filmmakers have managed to create is a credible and well-balanced movie that does not glorify the act, though they make no bones about how much of a coup the escape…

  • mother!

    September 22, 2017 - By 

    mother! is a slow burner panic attack. Imagine being an introvert who throws a house party but sets the invitation as Public. You’re trying to scrub Glen’s and Fanta out of the nice rug but there’s a mob in your kitchen, and, suddenly, crash! The sound of plates hitting marble. Or you’re a young woman married to your professor, two decades your senior, and you give, and dote, and adore, but one day you realise he might not need you the way you need him, and that’s terrifying, and the more he withdraws the more desperate you get. Or you’re…

  • Insyriated

    September 19, 2017 - By 

    At a time when the Syrian conflict seems to be in its last days, Belgian writer/director Philippe Van Leeuw has created a unique and timely piece that deals with the huge complications faced by those who refuse to be moved from beseiged areas. What makes Insyriated stand out as a great piece of filmmaking is Van Leeuw’s nuanced approach to the conflict, with undifferentiated antagonists and a focus on the struggles of a family trying their best to live a normal life under impossible circumstances. And it is all impressively done with a hefty dose of realism, given the undoubted low…

  • Pennywise For Your Thoughts: How It Unlocked Childhood Terror

    September 8, 2017 - By 

    In the bifurcated narrative of Stephen King’s 1986 novel It, adapted by Lawrence D. Cohen and Tommy Lee Miller into a two-part TV movie in 1990 and back in cinemas this week with Bill Skarsgård under the Pennywise powder, childhood trauma folds into adulthood fragility. In the second part of the original movie, generally acknowledged to be the weaker of the two, the grown-up Losers Club of Derry, Maine return to their hometown to face Tim Curry’s murderous Dancing Clown, back at it 27 years later. The young friends’ encounters with Pennywise and his shape-shifting forms are vividly dramatised in…

  • The Farthest

    September 7, 2017 - By 

    Whether or not space exploration is your thing, The Farthest is an essential documentary that tells the amazing story of the Voyager mission that was launched in August 1977, with the aim of exploring the outer regions of our solar system and beyond. But what is every bit as interesting as the scientific aspect of the mission is the gold vinyl cargo containing various messages and media – even encoded pictures – from earth for any would-be extraterrestrials that might come into contact with the two space crafts. An interstellar message in a bottle, you might say. Director Emer Reynolds…

  • It

    September 6, 2017 - By 

    Right on schedule, it’s 27 years later and we’re back in Derry. It was inevitable that Stephen King’s It, immortalised by Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen’s TV movie and Tim Curry’s childhood-scarring circus fiend, would get drawn into the Hollywood remake machine, even if the story’s theme of inter-generational recurrence does at least provide a meta-logic. The first half of Warner Bros’ two-parter, Mama director Andy Muschietti has been tasked with introducing a new generation to King’s Losers Club and the shape-shifting clown that’s buttering them up with sweet, tasty fear. And fair enough: for younger horror fans,…