• The Devil’s Doorway

    July 20, 2018 - By 

    A pregnant woman in chains; the off-screen wailing of child spirits; close-ups of the Virgin Mary with lines of blood down her cheeks, weeping at the sights she sees. The Devil’s Doorway, a Northern Irish horror which last week screened in the Galway Film Fleadh, and received American release through IFC Midnight, is an efficient frightener with local colour and a dense, tight atmosphere of suffering, penance and punishment. You might call it Catholic guilt. The debut film from Belfast writer and director Aislinn Clarke, who lectures in Creative Writing at Queen’s University, and the first NI Screen-backed feature from…

  • Skyscraper

    July 19, 2018 - By 

    The studio summer blockbuster, a reliable genre of more!, seems the perfect fit for the bulking, hulking anatomy of Dwayne Johnson. In everything he does, The Rock operates in Trumpian economies of size: the largest pecs, the highest reps, the most humility. His last studio film, Rampage, released only three months ago, saw him partner with a gargantuan gorilla to fight Boulevard-sized beasties. Johnson’s latest, Skyscraper, casts him as a security expert forced to save his family from not just a burning building, but a building that happens to be the tallest one in the world. Yuuge. The architectural ambition…

  • 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…

  • Set It Up

    June 21, 2018 - By 

    A romantic comedy designed from the stuff of nightmares for HR departments, Set It Up is an entertaining if slight story about workplace romances, demanding bosses and overworked employees. The main romance is between two overworked assistants who decide to set their demanding bosses up in the hope of spending less time in the office. Harper (Zoey Deutch), a sports and popcorn obsessive, wants to write and date but struggles to do either because of the hours she puts in at the office. Charlie (Glen Powell) is looking to secure a promotion to increase his salary while maintaining his relationship with his model girlfriend…

  • The Boy Downstairs

    June 13, 2018 - By 

    HBO’s Girls has become a shorthand for certain kinds of New Yorkian slice of life dramedies and romances, shaped by the ‘hipster’ spaces and attitudes of articulate inner-city millenials. Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour (2014), for example, which presented a same-sex relationship and breakup in rom-com retrospective, got labelled by some outlets as a lesbian version of Lena Dunham’s show (on which Akhavan later made an appearance). New rom-com The Boy Downstairs, the first feature from writer-director Sophie Brooks, an NYU film school grad, invites the same comparisons. Its details suggest the aesthetic geography of the urban creatives — a craft beer store, a twinkly roof party, a…

  • Book Club

    June 7, 2018 - By 

    Partly a feature-length advertisement for Random House’s most famous erotic novel series, partly an unintentional satire about the dire state of affairs for older female actors in Hollywood, partly a bland romantic comedy that sticks to formula, Book Club’s eye-raising hook centres on a group of autumnal friends who read 50 Shades of Grey and find their libidinal juices suddenly brought to the boil. It’s like a producer read one of those 2011 articles about middle-aged housewives renovating their own personal Red Rooms, click his ‘treatment’ fingers and then the thing sat in production for seven years. The Christian Grey…

  • Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

    June 7, 2018 - By 

    Welcome to cinema’s annual extinction event. Or, as it’s known around these parts, the summer. ‘Fallen’ is the word alright. We are a long way from the expertly choreographed, memorably human spectacles that launched a thousand lunchboxes back in ’93. The Jurassic series has struggled to replicate the original Spielberg magic and the exhaustion continues with Fallen Kingdom, the fifth in the franchise and the second in Universal’s second round of ill-fated trips to Isla Nublar (are there any other kind?). Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow, having gotten the call from Kathleen Kennedy, is out, but he and Derek Connolly have stayed on writing duties.…

  • Life of the Party

    May 16, 2018 - By 

    Life of The Party is a comedy about the danger of compromising for your partner. Melissa McCarthy plays the homely, mumsy Deanna, whose husband Dan announces he’s filing for divorce just after they drop their daughter off for her first college semester. Feeling sucker-punched and bereft, she decides to enrol in the college herself and finish the archaeology degree she abandoned when she got pregnant. Dan (Veep’s Matt Walsh) is shacking up with a glamorous realtor (Modern Family’s Julie Bowen), leaving Deanna bitter at having put him first all her life and having little to show for it. The message…

  • Deadpool 2

    May 16, 2018 - By 

    In the beefed up, more densely populated Deadpool 2, an expanded talent budget means Ryan Reynolds’ chattering ‘Merc with the Mouth’ gets to assemble his own super-team (named ‘X-Force’, because ‘X-Men’ is sexist). One of his recruits is Domino (a breezy Zazie Beetz), whose power is to be permanently in Fortune’s good books. She is effortlessly lucky: spinning cars whizz past her, guns in her face jam and a blustery day blows her parachute in just the right direction (prevailing winds turn out to be a not-minor plot point). In Reynolds’ rearguard mutant franchise, 20th Century Fox have found their own…

  • Avengers: Infinity War

    April 27, 2018 - By 

    Yeah, there’s some spoilers. “We’re in the end game,” announces Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dr. Strange in Avengers: Infinity War. Sure we are Steve, but it’s a long game. For ten years the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been in the group stages. Infinity War is the qualifying round. There’s still the semis to look forward to. The basic narrative logic of Marvel Studios’ unprecedented and profitable experiment in serialised story-telling is that of deferred gratification. Maybe you liked this specific film, maybe you didn’t. But hey, check out what’s coming up next. Here’s Spider-Man. Here’s the Guardians of the Galaxy. Here’s the big bad…