• Transformers: Age of Extinction

    July 14, 2014 - By 

    That the Transformers films, brought to us jointly by Hasbro’s accountancy department and the jock-bro personality of Michael Bay, are bad is nearly common knowledge. But few Hollywood franchises have so aggressively courted the kind of sublime awfulness to which audiences have been subjected every second summer or so in recent memory. At the beginning of Age of Extinction, the fourth in the franchise and scripted by series regular Ehren Kruger, Optimus Prime is introduced hiding out in an abandoned movie theatre, where the old-timer owner bemoans the state of modern cinema. “It’s all sequels and reboots!” he complains, a…

  • Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie: A Dissection

    July 3, 2014 - By 

    It is hard to imagine a less fashionable sitcom than Mrs. Brown’s Boys, Brendan O’Carroll’s cash-spewing granny-drag comedy in which he plays the foul-mouthed matriarch at its centre. Based on the act O’Carroll and various family members developed on stage over years of touring, and co-developed by RTE and BBC Scotland, the show is powered by the comic appeal of a stocky man in a dinner lady’s vest pottering about sets, mugging for the audience, laughing at his own jokes and spitting out ‘fecks’ like punctuation. Trading on shoe-worn sitcom set-ups, Mammy-knows-best nostalgia and gags so broad a rookie stormtrooper…

  • Cold In July

    June 30, 2014 - By 

    Michael C. Hall has established himself as a talented, highly watchable actor with considerable range through his successful roles on television in Dexter and Six Feet Under. But can he make the breakthrough onto the big screen? With roles in Gamer and Kill Your Darlings, among others, it’s been a fairly mixed bag so far and in his latest film Cold in July the greater mystery is Hall’s future career path, rather than the film’s narrative. Based on the novel of the same name by Joe R. Lansdale, writer of Bubba-Ho-Tep, Cold In July finds Michael C. Hall in everyman territory as…

  • Road

    June 17, 2014 - By 

    For those of us only superficially aware of the annual TT road racing season, an internationally respected series of two-wheel races which run in Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man over the spring and summer months, Richard de Aragues’ 2011 film TT3D: Closer to the Edge was a fascinating introduction to the daredevil sport. Road, from local film-makers Diarmuid Lavery and Michael Hewitt of Doubleband Films, serves as a more thematically rich follow-up or companion piece. Narrower in scope and sharper in feeling with its focus on the story of Ballymoney’s Dunlop racing dynasty, the documentary charts the road…

  • X-Men: Days of Future Past

    May 26, 2014 - By 

    Before Sam Raimi’s Spiderman films, before Iron Man, the Avengers and even Marvel Studios, before Christopher Nolan’s Batman, there was X-Men. The film that jumpstarted this comic book movie boom, Bryan Singer’s effort from 2000 remains perhaps the best installment in the series, along with the sequel that followed, X-2: X-Men United. Then Singer jumped ship to helm Superman Returns and the franchise went belly up with a series of misfires. That is until Matthew Vaughn restored some prestige with X-Men: First Class. But now Singer is back and he’s brought a few friends along too. Days of Future Past…

  • Fading Gigolo

    May 23, 2014 - By 

    John Turturro has carved out an incredible career as a character actor in the films of the Coen brothers and Spike Lee in particular. Fading Gigolo sees him breaking new ground as writer, director and star and he’s brought the undisputed master of this art along for the ride in Woody Allen. A comedy about sex and religion sounds like vintage Woody, but while Fading Gigolo may be about the oldest profession in the world, it’s far from vintage. Fading Gigolo sees Woody Allen break new ground, playing pimp to Turturro’s reluctant prostitute and as a premise it’s a pretty…

  • Cavalry

    April 17, 2014 - By 

    Calvary is the second feature film from John Michael McDonagh, following on from the very successful The Guard. Unlike his brother Martin’s second feature, the messy, dated Seven Psychopaths, John Michael has followed his funny (though somewhat flimsy) first film with a darker, much more bold tale of the clash between faith and doubt in modern-day Ireland. Calvary is interesting for its contemporary significance but disappointing for its lack of originality. Father James (Brendan Gleeson) is threatened by an unknown man in his confession box – the man claims that he will kill James in one week, not because he is a bad priest, but…

  • Her

    February 18, 2014 - By 

    Her opens with a close-up of its star, Joaquin Phoenix, speaking directly into the camera, but he is not addressing the audience. Nor is he speaking to another character on the other side of the camera. Instead he is talking to a machine. Her imagines a world only one step removed from the one we live in today, where the only conversations people have are with their phones or their computers, of a lonely, cellular existence where every human interaction is managed through a digital medium. The film takes place in a near-future Los Angeles and follows Theodore Twombly (Phoenix),…

  • Gravity

    November 11, 2013 - By 

    It’s been over six years since Alfonso Cuarón, director of Children Of Men and Y Tu Mamá Tambien, stepped behind the camera and this is truly a shame for contemporary. The man is inarguably one of the great visual filmmakers working today. His long, handheld shots with their ambition and scope genuinely inspire awe; this is a man who managed to take us through a concentration camp with gunfights, explosions and stairs without cutting. Cuarón’s friend, collaborator and equal, Guillermo Del Toro, observed a similar albeit shorter absence. Both came back in 2013. Del Toro’s Pacific Rim was a solid,…

  • Blue Jasmine

    October 10, 2013 - By 

    “This song was playing when we first met, do you know it?” On the surface Blue Jasmine is a portrait of a woman trying to climb back up the social and economic ladder into a life that she had the express elevator to beforehand. But beneath this and beneath the surface of every character in the film there is so much more to find. Woody Allen provides a view into a world that, for most us, is alien in almost every way. Yet through the strength of the writing and brilliant structure of the film, we immediately feel comfortable there,…