• Dublin Film Fest: The Breadwinner

    March 6, 2018 - By 

    Cartoon Saloon make stories about the value of making stories. In the first solo feature from the Kilkenny animation studio, The Secret of Kells (2009), the stories are those of myth and faith ferried by the Book of Kells, diligently reproduced by illuminators under siege from Nordic barbarians. In Song of the Sea (2014), the narratives are personal, a coastal family working through the loss of a wife and mother, using musical notes as form of memory preservation. Saloon’s third feature, The Breadwinner, due for release this May, blends the private and the public, shifting out of the studio’s Celtic…

  • Red Sparrow

    March 6, 2018 - By 

    Based upon the book of the same name by ex-CIA agent Jason Matthews, Red Sparrow is a modern-day spy thriller by director Francis Lawrence (Hunger Games: Catching Fire, I Am Legend) that harks back to the days of the cold war thrillers of the 70s/80s but fails to update it appropriately, coming across as a piece of vitriolic propaganda and little else. Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone) and the rest of the top-notch cast try their damndest to give it some credibility but the story and premise make for a predictably silly and gratuitous affair on many levels. Dominika Egorova (Lawrence)…

  • Dublin Film Fest: Pre-Crime

    March 2, 2018 - By 

    Artificial intelligence, drones and self-driving cars have moved from science fiction stories into the real world. In The Minority Report, Philip K. Dick imagined a cop who used the pre-cognitive abilities of mutant siblings to solve serious crimes before they happened. Real cops predict crime too, except they turn to big data for help. Showing at the Dublin International Film Festival, Pre-Crime examines how police departments and private businesses use public and private information to work out who is likely to carry out illegal acts. The idea of proactive policing to stop crime isn’t new, but it has been transformed…

  • Dublin Film Fest: Marlina The Murderer in Four Acts

    March 1, 2018 - By 

    Lance Daly’s Black 47 opened the Dublin Film Festival with a revenge Western filtered through Irish historical grievance, bearded men with rifles chasing eachother across Connault mud and muck. Written and directed by Mouly Surya, Marlina The Murderer in Four Acts offers a kind of feminist counterweight, an Indonesian Western which appropriates classical genre scaffolding for a regionally specific tale of female rage and empowerment. The whiplash lettering and blaring brass notes from the school of Morricone introduce us to Part 1, “The Robbery” (the others are “The Journey”, “The Confession” and “The Birth”). Marlina (Marsha Timothy) lives in the…

  • Dublin Film Fest: Tower. A Bright Day

    February 28, 2018 - By 

    The ‘tower’ of the title, or ‘wieza’ in the original Polish of Jagoda Szelc’s debut feature Tower. A New Day, is represented by Mula (Anna Krotoska), a tightly wound, defensive mother and wife who lives in the countryside with her family. She has the pressure of looking after her sick mother, who exists in a borderline comatose state in a spare room, and her young niece Nina (Laila Hennessy), abandoned by her birth mother and raised by Mula as her own. On the eve of Nina’s First Holy Communion, the family is visited by her biological mother, Mula’s sister Kaja…

  • 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…

  • Dublin Film Fest: Beast

    February 27, 2018 - By 

    Lies told to protect the feelings of a loved one can have untold consequences. In Beast, troubled Moll (Jessie Buckley) decides to leave her birthday party to go dancing. After staying out all night, she meets Pascal (Johnny Flynn), a handsome outsider in grubby jeans and a torn t-shirt. On impulse, Moll covers for him when they are stopped at a police checkpoint. The initial attraction between Moll and Pascal develops into a passionate connection, much to the distress of Moll’s family. Her mother Hilary (Gerarldine James) is distant and controlling while her siblings treat Moll with casual disdain. Every…

  • Lady Bird

    February 23, 2018 - By 

    Screenwriting 101, they say, is create conflict. Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), the protagonist of writer-director Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, is a constant source of conflict, perennially fighting with all those around her. For what, she’s not always sure, it’s simply who she is. Her fighting is a form of self-expression, she’s fighting for her self-expression. As she says when a Father at her Catholic high school asks if “Lady Bird” is her given name- “Yes, I gave it to myself. It’s given to me, by me.” Set in 2002, Christine’s roller coaster final year of high school provides…

  • Dublin Film Fest: Black 47

    February 23, 2018 - By 

    The blackness is in the land, of course, the blight that’s reduced potatoes to asbestos, but, in Dublin Film Festival opener Black 47, it’s also in the hearts of the men who hold dominion over the land, and in the empire that produces them. Set in 1847, as crop failure and fever decimates the native Irish population, Lance Daly’s fourth feature reimagines the Great Irish Famine as a righteous revenge Western, a muddy, politically cynical chase thriller with shades of Rambo. James Frecheville stars as Michael Feeney, a Connacht man who returns home from overseas service in the British Army, to…

  • Fifty Shades Freed

    February 14, 2018 - By 

    Three Valentine’s Days later, it’s finally over. Jamie Dornan has been humiliated and audiences have been punished, but by this point you know what you’re in for. In order to get anything from Fifty Shades Freed, the climax to this improbable trilogy, you have to just hold up your hands and submit. Christian Grey gets his happy ending. The rest of us will have to get our rocks off elsewhere. Picking off where Darker left off, the soap opera romance is in full swing. There’s still the odd trip to the Red Room, sure, but Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) and Christian (Dornan)…