• Classic British Horror Screenings @ The Ulster Folk Museum

    August 19, 2016 - By 

    Northern Ireland Screen Digital Film Archive, National Museums Northern Ireland, the British Film Institute and FilmHubNI, classic British horror movies come to rural Northern Ireland for a pair of unique events at Cultra, Holywood’s Ulster Folk & Transport Museum. In the atmospheric setting of the Folk Museum, the audience will have an opportunity to wander through the parkland on which the museum is situated and discover the charming period cottages, farms, schools and shops to set the scene. Before the feature, there will be a screening of footage from Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive. Focusing on the theme of folk…

  • Aidan Moffat: ‘Where You’re Meant To Be’ screening & performance @ Black Box, Belfast

    May 5, 2016 - By 

    Aidan Moffat has been a busy man over the last few years but that hasn’t stopped him from quietly taking the Scottish folk songs of the countryside and transplanting them to the city. Working alongside documentary filmmaker Paul Fegan, Where You’re Meant To Be is part Road movie and part music documentary. Where You’re Meant To Be is Fegan’s first feature-length but the director is a former music promoter in Glasgow and has previously made a short film Pouters (streaming for free online) alongside a number of music videos for Aidan Moffat & Bill Wells and Belle & Sebastian. As…

  • Cinema 16 For ’16: Hitchcock/Truffaut

    March 7, 2016 - By 

    An alternative guide to this year’s cinematic offerings, we trawl through the dilapidated rows of seats in the back alley ‘art’ cinemas and crumbling picture palaces so you don’t have to. Rescuing gummy Venus de Milos from sticky crevices and fishing midget gems out of cold cups of tea. Diaries at the ready cinephiles. Hitchcock. You barely need to say anything else. In fact, you don’t need to say anything at all, you could just scribble Hitch’s nine stroke signature line drawing – a caricature of the director in profile. No director has cast such a long shadow over the…

  • Amy

    July 1, 2015 - By 

    I really didn’t want her to die. I mean, it’s a ludicrous thing to say: this is Amy Winehouse. We know how the story ends. But as Asif Kapadia’s scrupulously chronological film unspools we follow this charming, bolshy North London girl from a friend’s 14th birthday party (filmed in the unfailing fawn and sage colour scheme of 90’s video footage) through to the first few steps of her recording career and onto a success that she didn’t want and couldn’t withstand. “I don’t think I’ll be at all famous,” she offers in an interview. “I don’t think I could handle…

  • Tokyo Godfathers: A Hunky Dory Christmas

    December 22, 2014 - By 

    Christmas films are a tough nut to crack, if you’ll pardon the pun. They require an almost faultless balance of pathos and sentimentality, lest we forget that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is about the failure of common man and suicide as well as angels attaining wings. If you go too far in one direction, you can end with a film which seems insincere, idiotic and full of saccharine trust. The inverse of that is you end up with a nasty, hateful film which just sneers at the audience. Every now and then, a film gets the balance just right; Satoshi…

  • Nebraska @ QFT

    December 6, 2013 - By 

    From Friday December 6 right up until Sunday December 22, Queen’s Film Theatre Belfast will be screening Alexander Payne’s latest film, Nebraska. Having established his filmmaking style on the likes of Sideways, About Schmidt and the The Descendants, Payne’s latest film sets a very odd couple off on a journey – this time across the plains of the small-town Midwest. Boasting a cast including Bruce Dern (pictured), Will Forte and June Squibb, the move is, according to the QFT website, “an affectionate but refreshingly unsentimental portrait of small-town America, and the complex, often troubled, relationships we have with our parents,…

  • This Is The End

    July 6, 2013 - By 

    From the outset, This Is The End sets its stall out for all to see. It’s crass, self referential, and controversial. All to be expected “from the guys who brought you Pineapple Express and Superbad“. The real question is – is it funny? The answer, unequivocally, is yes. Presented with just enough of a wink and a nod to how obviously self-indulgent it is (“Dear God, it’s me, Jonah Hill… from Moneyball“), This Is The End manages to contort its few staple jokes (swearing, and booze/drug/sex references) into 107 minutes of laugh out loud absurdity. This Is The End breaks…

  • Man of Steel – Triumph or Washout?

    June 18, 2013 - By 

    There are mixed reports circulating the blogosphere with many flat out flunking Zack Snyder’s attempt to shape the controversial Superman franchise. Man of Steel has a dream team of Hollywood’s elite behind it but could it be a case of too many cooks? It’s easy to see where this film fails and the problem seems to lie almost solely with the direction. The pace of the film is completely off; a labored and awkward introduction eats into the film’s running time creating a knock on affect on the overall development of the plot. Throughout the film, time is allocated to…