• Mercury 13

    April 26, 2018 - By 

    We might not be able to change the past, but there is always the opportunity to learn from it. This is the central theme of Mercury 13, the latest release in Netflix’s original documentary strand. It tells the story of the women who aspired to be among the first astronauts but faced rejection because of their sex. In 1960, 25 women were chosen to take part in a privately funded ‘women in space’ study. The project was organised by Dr Randy Loveless who had supervised the selection tests for NASA’s first astronauts, the Mercury 7. Each woman was a highly…

  • Belfast Film Fest: The Rider

    April 23, 2018 - By 

    Lame horses get shot and broken cowboys get put out to pasture in Chloé Zhao’s The Rider, a soulful, touching look at ranchers and riders in the modern American heartland, based on the real-life experiences of its lead, former rodeo performer Brady Jandreau. Zhao, who previously looked at vulnerabilities on the open plain in 2015’s Songs My Brother Taught Me, casts unknowns and keeps the film light and loose, its wide open landscapes of sky and rock the backdrop to the pain of a talented rodeo cowboy forced to hang up his stirrups and face the existentialist wilderness after suffering a…

  • Rampage

    April 13, 2018 - By 

    Even in stupidity there can be poetry. In the Midway Games’ Rampage series, released across arcades and consoles since 1986, the player controls a giant rat, ape or alligator whose sole objective is to destroy as much urban landscape as possible. Smash, smash, smash. Totally, blissfully uncomplicated. Things like ‘plot’ and personable characterisation weren’t pressing priorities. But a writer room abhors a vacuum, and the big-screen Rampage, the latest vehicle for one-man industry Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, expands the building-bashing conceit into a messy, tonally wild and strangely restrained man versus monster blockbuster. The focus of Rampage is a hulking…

  • Michael Inside

    April 12, 2018 - By 

    There can be a certain suspicion about films that generate a lot of positive advance word. Can any film really be that good? Is it all hype? Thankfully, the fuss about Michael Inside is justified. This is a terrific piece of film-making about the consequences of one moment in a young man’s life. Michael McCrea (Dafhyd Flynn) is 18 years old and lives with his grandfather Francis (Lalor Roddy) in a housing estate in a disadvantaged area of Dublin. His father is in prison and his mother died from a drugs overdose when he was younger. Michael has plans to…

  • A Quiet Place

    April 10, 2018 - By 

    For anyone forced to do the Sunday visit rounds, the concept of family life as an exercise in barely tolerable, near-silent tension is a familiar one. The pause between programme and adverts. The clacking clock hand on an ugly mantelpiece. The latest in John Krasinski’s canny pivot from straight-to-camera GIF-ery to leading man robustness, A Quiet Place brings high-concept genre logic to family quiet time, positing a near-future in which humanity has been devastated by insectoid alien invaders, so-called ‘dark angels’, with no sight organs but a highly tuned sense of hearing, perking up at minor wallops and bangs a mile away. Krasinki…

  • Love, Simon

    April 2, 2018 - By 

    Love, Simon is a queer teen drama that wants you to know up front it’s sorry for being so, well, straight. Loosely adapted from Becky Albertalli’s 2015 novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, the film opens with a voiceover from Simon Spier (Nick Robinson), providing a mea culpa for his boring, stable life, the kind of intensely comfortable existence accepted as default by studio teenage flicks. Simon lives in a gorgeous house with his younger sister and hot parents (Jennifer Garner and Transformers’ Josh Duhamel). He gives his happy, handsome friends rides to school in the morning, picking up iced lattes…

  • Ready Player One

    March 28, 2018 - By 

    After Steven Spielberg changed the movie world with Jaws in 1975, he bought a cavernous Beverley Hills home and filled it with arcade machines. Newly minted and paranoid, the director also installed an elaborate security system, and refused to accept deliveries at the door. Hollywood’s hottest director and his walled-off playpen. Ready Player One is a film built for Spielberg The Younger, from Spielberg The Elder, a cautionary celebration of pop culture toy islands, a messy, whizzing trip into the lens-flare fantasies of the geek id. In Ready Player One, ‘the OASIS’ is the biggest toy-box ever invented. A giant virtual reality and intensely lucrative…

  • Unsane

    March 23, 2018 - By 

    Before last year’s criminally ignored The Florida Project, Sean Baker made headlines by shooting 2015 feature Tangerine on iPhone gear (the director used 3 different iPhone 5s). Indie authenticity suited the low-key story of pair of transgendered prostitutes on the Sunset Strip, capturing the forced street intimacy and, when tilted skywards, the expansive, beautifully festive colouring of one-crazy-night Los Angeles. Now Steven Soderbergh, no stranger to doing things his own way, has shot his new film Unsane with an iPhone rig (iPhone 7 Plus in 4K, with the app FiLMiC Pro). No doubt it helped keep some costs down — again, Soderbergh…

  • The Square

    March 20, 2018 - By 

    At the beginning of Palme d’Or-winning The Square, another cold, almost hypothermic portrait of male insincerity from Force Majeure’s Ruben Östlund, a successful Stockholm art curator is interviewed by a nervous journalist (Elizabeth Moss). With his fey scarf, bright but not unfashionable socks and red designer spectacles, tactically removed to communicate casualness, Christian, played by Claes Bang, is every inch the dreamy modern intellectual. When Moss’ interviewer asks him to unpack the dense description of one of the museum’s events, an investigation of the ‘topos’ of the exhibition space, he struggles, offering a glib line about the validity of normal objects becoming…

  • You Were Never Really Here

    March 15, 2018 - By 

    If ever there was a filmmaker that could be referred to as uncompromising and exuding integrity, then Lynne Ramsey (We Need To Talk About Kevin) is certainly up there with the best of them. After The Lovely Bones was snatched away by Peter Jackson in 2009 and Jane Got A Gun resulted in her walking off the set due to producer interference, Ramsey’s steadfastness has paid off with this stunning trip of a film, that has the great Joaquin Phoenix in an awesomely committed role. One that may be his greatest yet. Joe (Phoenix) is a mentally scarred US military veteran,…