The Grand Seduction

Just when you thought Brendan Gleeson could do no wrong he gets himself involved in a project so misguided that even a well trained Labrador with sat nav would struggle to point it back in the right direction. The aim was presumably to produce a whimsical update on other films about small remote communities wrestling…

The Fury

A curiously old fashioned war film, albeit one which, with modern movie techniques, offers an unprecedentedly realistic account of the brutality of close quarters fighting in WWII. Think Saving Private Ryan and then some. It’s April 1945 and as the allies push deeper into Germany a tank squadron commanded by veteran colour sergeant Collier “Wardaddy”…

Night Crawler

What an absolute stonker of a movie! This is three films in one and they are all equally audacious. First it’s a brilliantly observed character piece. Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) embodies all the virtues needed to fulfil the American Dream. He is ambitious, persistent, indomitable, hard working and has a most agile mind. But there…

’71

Yann Demange’s powerful and vivid account of a hapless young soldier accidentally lost in Catholic West Belfast in 1971 is a very impressive debut feature. He took some pains to establish an authentic setting for his movie, using a condemned tower block complex in Blackburn as a proxy for the Divis flats; a startlingly ominous…

Gone Girl

Ben Affleck (Nick Dunne) and Rosamund Pike (Amy Dunne) star as a pair of out of work journalists, recently relocated from New York to Missouri (which the actors insisted on pronouncing as Misery – deliberate?. Discuss. ) This was in part a response to Nick’s mother’s illness but it is also driven by necessity as…

The Judge

The Runaway Jury meets Orange Osage County in David Dobkin’s solid but overlong story of american contrasts. Old is pitted against young, town against country, past against present and both ends of the moral compass come sharply into focus as Hank Palmer (Robert Downey Jr.), an unscrupulous big city lawyer “everyone wants Atticus Finch until…

The Guest

For an hour I quite bought into Adam Wingard’s cuckoo in the nest drama. Imagine the twisted progeny of Funny Games with its underplayed but deeply troubling sociopath lead and the gathering foreboding of Night of the Hunter and you have a fair idea of the set up here. Dan Stevens as David Collins leaves…

Welcome to New York

I suppose the first thing to say about Abel Ferrara’s latest film is that the straight to camera disclaimer delivered by Gerard Depardieu before the opening credits is almost comically disingenuous. To all intents and purposes this is a dramatic reconstruction of events in 2009 when Dominique Strauss-Kahn then the head of the IMF, assaults…