• Jawbone

    There is no doubt that Jawbone, director Thomas Q. Napper’s debut, follows many of the usual tropes that most of the boxing/fighting movies out there fall into. You could even say that its subplot, dealing with first time writer and star, Johnny Harris’ (Gangster No 1) alcohol addiction, is a formula that has been flogged to death in this genre. However, what gives Jawbone an edge over the rest is its superb cast and acting, the brutally honest and realistic manner in which it deals with addiction, depression and societal decay, along with a refreshing lack of glorification surrounding its premise.…

  • Snatched

    Snatched begins with Amy Schumer, her second leading role after 2015’s Trainwreck, in a familiar comic persona from her standup, film and TV work: the Messy White Girl, whose oblivious, entitled sense of privilege is expressed with a malice-free, faint irony. Emily (Schumer) is fired from her retail job (after a funny bait-and-switch with screenwriter Katie Dippold) and dumped by her rockstar boyfriend, responding to the slights with hurt, haughty denial. Left with no-one to join her on a non-refundable resort trip to Ecuador, and conveniently moved by memories of her divorced homebody mother (Goldie Hawn) in happier, more fun-loving…

  • Alien: Covenant

    A recurring theme in Ridley Scott’s late-career return to the Alien universe, with 2012’s Prometheus and now Alien: Covenant, with more possibly on the way, is the disappointing and disastrous consequences of hubristic father figures chasing perfection. The ill-received Prometheus, part Alien teaser, part Lindelofian word cloud, spun its mythic pretensions into a gorgeous, cynical and narratively garbled take on will and birth, outlining how humanity’s space-monk creators tried to wipe us out once they realized their children’s deep, deep failings, deploying a weaponised virus that escaped their control. A formulaic monster horror with an interest in sci-fi abstractions, Covenant…

  • The Journey

    With the opening credits of The Journey stating that you are about to watch an imagined depiction of what happened between Ian Paisley (Timothy Spall) and Martin McGuinness (Colm Meaney) during a key moment in the Northern Ireland peace process, you can hopefully brace yourself for the ludicrously ill-conceived film that screenwriter and novelist Colin Bateman and director Nick Hamm (Godsend) have decided to bestow upon the public. Set in 2007, when the sworn enemies were at loggerheads over how they could cut a deal and set up a power-sharing government between Paisley’s DUP and McGuinness’ Sinn Fein, the two…

  • Lady Macbeth

    Like a tightly wound corset ready to explode, Lady Macbeth is masterfully controlled period piece with a rebellious, cruel heart. Based on Nikolai Leslov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk, which imagined Shakespeare’s play from the perspective of the Scottish king’s much-maligned wife and cheerleader, the film applies its own interpretative reorientation to 19th-century England’s landed gentry, a social world the English imagination clings to in dusty, wistful, National Heritage nostalgic, a cosy image of class harmony imminently worthy of subversion (the film has been called an ‘anti-Downton Abbey‘). Lady Macbeth is a bold and confident debut work from screenwriter Alice Birch…

  • I Am Not Your Negro

    If the words and legacy of poet, playwright, novelist and social commentator James Baldwin were ever in danger of being forgotten, then director Raoul Peck (Fatal Assistance) has done the world a great justice. And who better to deliver these words than Samuel L Jackson, with his suitably defiant, yet eloquent delivery of the great man’s words. I Am Not Your Negro is a documentary that compiles various writings on race relations in the US by Baldwin before he died in 1987 and ties them into the huge racial problems that still exist today. The film is centred around material…

  • Unforgettable

    Unforgettable is a pulpy crazy-ex thriller about the resentment directed at someone taking up space where they do not belong. Rosario Dawson is the likeable new squeeze and Katherine Heigl is the ice-Barbie hovering at the sidelines, desperate and calculated, willing to do anything to reclaim the family she believes to be rightfully hers. And the movie itself, a first time directorial effort from seasoned producer Denise Di Novi, feels like it has taken a swerve and ended up in the wrong place. Sitting in the multiplex, you feel like you’ve drifted off on the sofa watching middle of the…

  • The Levelling

    Hope Dickson Leach keeps her aim steady and hits her targets in The Levelling, her first feature and a sturdy, professional piece of grim English countryside realism. Trainee veterinarian Clover (Game of Thrones’ Elle Kendrick) is called back to the family farm when she receives word that her brother Harry, who was just given stewardship over the land, has shot himself with a hunting shotgun. The police have filed it as suicide, but her father Aubrey (Joe Blakemore), insists that it was just a “bloody stupid” accident, a descriptor he seems to apply to almost everything, his manner one of…

  • BFF17: Waiting For You

    Waiting For You is a passive title for a passive sort of film. NI actor Colin Morgan (the titular warlock in BBC’s weekend fantasy Merlin) makes his feature lead debut as a grieving lad investigating his late father’s secrets in the first film from Charles Garrad, production designer turned director. Garrad’s design background is obvious in the sunny chateaux aesthetics, but more than anything Waiting gives the impression of a film built mood-first, with a screenplay from Garrad and Hugh Stoddart that’s much too fuzzy around the edges. Paul (Morgan) is an architecture uni dropout working in a book store…

  • BFF17: Bad Day For The Cut

    Closing the Belfast Film Festival with a shotgun blast worth of intense visceral thrills, Chris Baugh’s directorial debut is a revenge thriller with the same assured deadly aim of its lead character. Nigel O’Neill owns the screen as the farmer Donal, a quiet man content to live a small life with his mother. But when she’s murdered in a robbery gone wrong Donal sets out to the big city of Belfast in search of her killers. But both the search and the truth prove to be much more complicated than he could have ever foreseen. Screening to awed crowds at…