• Dublin Oldschool

    July 6, 2018 - By 

    It’s hard to picture Dublin Oldschool on the stage. Emmet Kirwan’s 2015 poem-play of the same name, which ran at the National Theatre and won the Stewart Parker award, finds rushing, thumping life on screen, with Kirwan staying on to screenwrite and star, joined by first-time feature director (and co-writer) Dave Tynan. Set free from its theatrical box, Oldschool is a film that never sits still for long. Set over the course of one druggy, downey, uppey bank holiday weekend in the Irish capital, Dublin Oldschool has a compellingly mobile energy. It snakes through Dublin’s streets and backalleys, across its…

  • Kissing Candice

    June 20, 2018 - By 

    This review was originally published as part of the Belfast Film Festival ’18 coverage. The Omagh-born Aoife McArdle showcased her feature debut, Kissing Candice, at the Belfast Film Festival, but she’s a director and screenwriter with plenty of experience and a well-developed eye, a confidence that shines through in the film, a mad, bad, thrilling vision of libidinal teenage energy. Billed by McArdle at a post-show Q&A as a look at ‘Irish youth in crisis’, Candice, from Venom Films and the Irish Film Board, is so much more interesting and vivid than the description, with its suggestion of bleeding-heart melancholic…

  • Dublin Film Fest: Good Favour

    February 28, 2018 - By 

    The big, bad Germanic woods spits out a wounded orphan in the opening of Rebecca Daly’s Good Favour, whose fairy tale clarity gives way to a woozy, slippery blend of crisp devotional realism and fanatical flights of fancy. The Irish director’s third feature, co-written with Glenn Montgomery, is a subtle, sturdily controlled parable about the power of shared myths, comparable to Robert Eggers’ The Witch if not in genre then in recreational detail and reality-breaking seriousness. Tom (Vincent Romeo) is the malnourished, skinny young man from the Black Forest, who stumbles on small markers of settlement: a hatchback truck, an empty classroom, a cabin…

  • Third Chance Saloon? Revisiting Kilkenny’s Oscar-Nominated Animations

    January 26, 2018 - By 

    Among the Irish nominations for the 90th Academy Awards, announced this week, was The Breadwinner, up for Best Animated Feature, from Kilkenny-based animation and design studio Cartoon Saloon. Based on Deborah Ellis’ novel, it follows a girl in late-90s Afghanistan whose father is unjustly arrested by the Taliban authorities, forcing her to pass as a boy in order to support her family. The film, which will receive its Irish premiere at the Dublin Film Festival next month and a wide release later in the Spring, is the company’s highest profile feature yet. In terms of Oscar nods, that makes it three out…

  • Sanctuary

    January 4, 2018 - By 

    Cinema has a soft spot for the disabled, or at least those with worthy and theatrically resonant types of disabilities, ones that can be overcome in three acts, and leave able-bodied audiences feeling good about abstractions like “the human spirit”. Actors are lauded as “brave” for embracing physical and verbal contortions: Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man; Eddie Redmayne’s Oscar for The Theory of Everything; and, last year, Andrew Garfield’s polio quadriplegic in Andy Serkis’ Breathe. Meanwhile, television is opening itself up to richer representations of those on the Asperger’s spectrum. But a feature film with an ensemble cast, all of…

  • 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…

  • Galway Film Fleadh: Maudie

    July 19, 2017 - By 

    The real-life tale of an arthritic misunderstood woman who finds meaning and recognition through art, Maudie could’ve have easily fallen victim to award-baiting faux-sensitivity. But much like the paintings produced by Nova Scotia artist Maud Lewis (1903–1970), now celebrated as one of Canada’s most famous folk artists, the biopic remains bright, simple, optimistic and a little childish. Dublin-born director Aisling Walsh (Song for a Raggy Boy, The Daisy Chain and numerous TV projects such as Dylan Thomas feature A Poet in New York) keeps a firm hand on Lesley Crewe’s script, which traces Lewis’ marriage, fame and eventual illness. Crewe,…

  • Twice Shy

    July 11, 2017 - By 

    The pressure on so-called ‘issue’ films to ‘start a conversation’, as the journo cliche goes, or, at least, to contribute to existing dialogue, can feel like an unfair burden. Good films are more nuanced than the message we would like to hear from them, and it’s hard to predict what kind of reactions they might provoke from wider audiences. Also, more crucially, meaningful conversations are just plain difficult things to have. To its credit, Irish indie Twice Shy, the second feature from Tipperary-born Tom Ryan, acknowledges this difficulty, and places the troubles of its characters ahead of its eye-catching subject…

  • Cardboard Gangsters

    June 23, 2017 - By 

    Cardboard Gangsters is an Irish crime drama from writer/director Mark O’Connor (King Of The Travellers) that tells a story familiar to fans of gangland movies, running through all the stereotypes and cliches that come with this oversaturated genre (which tend, in fairness, to be accurate). Thankfully the filmmakers have still managed to create a plausible and socially relevant film with an authentic grittiness and suitably dark premise, one bolstered by a strong lead performance from co-writer John Connors (Love/Hate). On the tough Darndale council estate in Dublin, four twenty-somethings, led by local DJ and hard lad, Jay Connolly (Connors) live…