• The Lion King

    July 25, 2019 - By 

    Real life looks boring. Rocks look boring. Trees look boring. Fluffy animals look boring. No-one opens their curtains in the morning and thinks wow, look at all that! This is a problem for The Lion King, one that sinks Disney’s photo-realistic reproduction almost from the word go. Jon Favreau’s nearly beat-for-beat prideland retread (new scenes expand the 1994 original’s 88 minute runtime) is a weird, alienating exercise in uncanny cynicism: the transparent cash-grabbing motive is depressing, but not nearly as depressing as having to actually watch the thing, which ticks over with the shiny time-killing futility of a high-res screensaver.…

  • Docs Ireland: Town of Strangers & When All Is Ruin Once Again

    June 28, 2019 - By 

    A weird coincidence treated Docs Ireland attendees to a pair of documentaries set in and around Gort, a small Galway town near the Clare border. Treasa O’Brien’s Town of Strangers is the more immediately charming of the two, an assemblage of residents who find themselves, through birth, accident or chance, sharing the town. O’Brien herself is a casual presence in the film: she was in the town trying to cast non-actors for a scripted feature, but found herself drawn towards the energy and personality of the people who showed up at auditions, and decided to stick around, living out of her van.…

  • Docs Ireland: Gaza

    June 24, 2019 - By 

    Is it strange to surf during a siege? The optics of a modern-day siege, and the visual poetics associated with the Gaza Strip, get scrambled and re-infused in Andrew McConnell and Garry Keane’s Gaza, closing night film of the Docs Ireland festival. Born out of McConnell’s “Gaza Surf Club” photography project, the film is a rare postcard from a desperate shoreline. “There is a barrier separating the people of Gaza from life itself”, muses a theatre performer, who provides poetic commentary on the struggle of those living in the ravaged Mediterranean enclave. Habitually designated as the world’s largest open-air prison, the Strip…

  • Docs Ireland: Diego Maradona

    June 21, 2019 - By 

    There are few football players on the planet that are more famous, or come with more infamy, than Argentina’s Diego Armando Maradona. When you throw this turbulent story into the hands of director Asif Kapadia and the team behind documentary classics Senna and Amy, you know you’re going to be in for an entertaining show. Diego Maradona achieves this right out of the gate, opening with blaring Italo-disco music and early-career party scenes. Primarily, the film gives us the two sides of Maradona; the unassuming and kind Diego; and the other, the wild, aggressive and philandering Maradona. In the early stages, you get a glimpse…

  • In Fabric

    June 21, 2019 - By 

    A haunted dress is the kind of premise that even Stephen King at the height of his cocaine period would struggle to make more than a short story out of, and a very silly one at that. But with In Fabric, Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy, Berberian Sound Studio) uses the conceit to create a deeply sensual and deranged experience that wraps itself around your brain and refuses to let go. As played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Shelia is a reserved and harried woman who yearns for some passion after separating from her husband. The day before a date, she’s convinced to buy…

  • Docs Ireland: The Inventor

    June 19, 2019 - By 

    An “invention” is, of course, not just a product you make, it’s a story you tell, a fancy you fashion. This linguistic slipperiness runs through Alex Gibney’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, his gripping critique of StartUpLand, a place pathologically allergic to plain speaking. Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) is one of the definitive portraits of corporate American group-think, flagging up the delusional market faith that would help decimate economies a couple of years later. The dangerous sway of belief and magical thinking are recurring preoccupations of the film-maker— his previous film was…

  • Docs Ireland: 2040

    June 14, 2019 - By 

    The screening of 2040 was packed with schoolchildren thanks to the involvement of Into Film, a Northern Irish charity focused on film as an educational tool, and it’s easy to see why Docs Ireland extended the invite. The film, presented and directed by Australia’s Damon Gameau, is a layperson’s guide to the causes of, and urgently needed possible solutions to, rapid climate breakdown, and a love letter to his daughter and the possible futures she will inhabit. There is a breezy pedagogical tone to the film, in which Gameau, via to-camera testimony, narration and slightly hokey visual aids, outlines the physical…

  • Docs Ireland: The Silence of Others

    June 14, 2019 - By 

    “Spain is covered in mass graves.” Buried wells of grief and pain stir underneath Spain’s transition from decades-long dictatorship to holiday destination democracy in Robert Bahar and Almudena Carracedo’s El silencio de otros (The Silence of Others), a sobering, difficult documentary with deep resonance for our own state and its preoccupation with protocols of remembering and forgetting. Mass executions, concentration camps, torture stations, stolen babies. Francoist Spain was a horror story, one that occupies less space in cultural memory than comparable collections of atrocities. Part of the reason for this is the so-called Pact of Forgetting, a bill passed following…

  • Gloria Bell

    June 7, 2019 - By 

    Gloria Bell is something of a gear change for Sebastián Lelio after his Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman. That film was a sobering deep dive into transphobia that drew fire from trans critics for dog piling woes upon a trans woman with little substance to back it up. Gloria Bell, an American remake of Lelio’s own 2013 film Gloria, is a much more nuanced and life affirming proposition The film’s opening act is a master class in patient character building. We follow Gloria, a fifty something year-old divorcee, as she sings love songs in the car, checks in on her distant…

  • Papi Chulo

    June 7, 2019 - By 

    2016’s Handsome Devil, a minor hit and the second film from Irish director John Butler, turned on issues of gay estrangement and unlikely male friendship. It balanced melodrama and excesses — like Andrew Scott’s literature teacher and his ‘Oh Captain, My Captain’ grandstanding — with a genuinely sweet consideration of the loneliness and alienation that comes with being young, gay and wayward. Butler channelled his own difficult queer history into a generally broad treatment, a heightening and blending of Irish cinematic tones. Papi Chulo takes Butler out of the island for the first time, but operates along similar thematic and tonal lines for its story of…