Film Reviews

By Michael McNulty You would find more enjoyment standing in a queue at the post office, ritualistically checking your watch and shuffling a quarter of an inch forward every 15 minutes than watching Mercedes Grower’s film, Brakes.  At 80 minutes, it instils a frustrating impatience that has you begging for the credits to roll.   Late in the film, one of the characters says, “I’ve just been pinned by the most boring person I know,” and you want to reach through...

Set in provincial Brooklyn during the last days of summer, Beach Rats follows Frankie (Harris Dickinson), a 19-year-old who spends most of his time fooling around with his posse of friends and his girlfriend Simone (Madeline Weinstein). He lives at home with his mother (Kate Hodge), younger sister, and bed ridden father who has cancer. Unbeknownst to everyone around him he also messages men on an online chatroom and meets them on the side of the highway for casual sex....

Suburbicon is set in 1957 within a suburban town of the same name. It is the kind of small American town that is synonymous with the work of Douglas Sirk and films like All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind, but it is a setting that has remained popular and has been seen more recently with Far From Heaven and Sam Mendes’ adaption of Revolutionary Road. It is here that we meet the Lodge family, headed up by...

By Jim Mackney There is a moment in Justice League where the central villain Steppenwolf, is shown in close up, nothing unusual about this and in Superhero films this is done to offer a sense of menace and danger. Here, however, it highlights the terrible CGI of Justice League as Steppenwolf ends up looking less like a blockbuster villain and more like a villain from a bargain bin PS3 game. This is not something you expect or want from a monolithic...

By Michael McNulty Mudbound, directed by Dee Rees and based on the novel of the same name by Hillary Jordan, is a mud-caked American epic.  Set in the Mississippi delta it tracks the tangled lives of two families over six years.  It is both lyrical and poignant, an expertly crafted microcosm of America that is troublingly relevant. A 31 year old virgin, Laura (Carey Mulligan), is whisked away by Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke), a man less romantic than he is...

The saturation of social media within our society may be celebrated by some for bringing us all closer together, but as Matt Spicer demonstrates with his sardonically incisive directorial debut, a life lived online isn’t always one big party. Indeed, for twenty-something Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza), it’s nothing but a platform to help accentuate her own isolation. We meet her sat in a car, sobbing uncontrollably as she fanatically scans the account of a “friend” on Instagram who married just hours...

We have all at one point or other seen our well made plans go awry but I’m sure they do not compare with the one at the centre of Good Time. Set in Queens, New York, the film opens with Nick Nikas (Ben Safdie) having a learning disability test. Before it can be completed his brother Connie (Robert Pattinson) bursts into the examiner’s office and takes Nick with him. It turns out that Connie has more important plans and the...

By Michael McNulty Whether you like Quentin Tarantino or not, the director has championed films that have often flown under the radar.  Don Siegel’s 1973 action crime caper film, Charley Varrick, being one of them.  The line, “they’ll go to work on you with a pair of pliers and blowtorch,” was lifted almost verbatim and uttered by Marsellus Wallace with such frightening malice in Pulp Fiction.  Siegel’s film is a taut, economical action flick based on the book, The Looters,...

By Jim Mackney A Caribbean Dream is a romantic comedy drama adapted from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The film was written and directed by Shakirah Bourne. The adaptation is set in modern Barbados with the island’s natural beauty expertly captured by cinematographer, Robin Whenary, the lush beaches along with the dense and vibrantly green forest popping on screen. Is there a need for another adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Perhaps not but this adaptation won Best Film at...