Selma, Patrick's Day and Jupiter Ascending hit cinema's this week - one's a must see, the others not so much. Check out our cinema round-up.
Jupiter Ascending
2/5
Starring: Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Eddie Redmayne, Booth, James D'Arcy, Sean Bean, Tuppence Middleton, Maria Doyle Kennedy
12A
The Wachowskis return with a galactic epic that is overly in debt to better, smarter movies like Dune and The Fifth Element. Soylent Green may even get a nod but this is one space opera that makes Battleground Earth look like Solaris.
From The Matrix to Cloud Atlas, Andy and Lana W have displayed a talent for real high wire verve and inventiveness but it’s easy to see why Jupiter Ascending’s release was delayed for nine months and why a post-production overhaul was also required - all of it is very visible in nearly every single scene in the two-hour running time.
It sure looks glossy and epic, and like The Matrix, it has very big and very interesting ideas about...
Selma
4/5
Starring: David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Tim Roth, Tom Wilkinson, Oprah Winfrey
12A
Ava DuVernay’s fine and stately film about the historic Selma marches of 1965 opens with Dr Martin Luther King Jr. being conferred with the Nobel Prize for Peace in December 1964.
Amid the pomp and ceremony of a state room in Oslo, it appears that the centuries’ long struggle for equal rights for black Americans has reached some kind of tipping point and that King’s life’s work is about to be realised.
Any visions of the promised land are brutally shattered by...
Read Alan Corr's full review here
Patrick's Day
2/5
Starring: Moe Dunford, Catherine Walker, Kerry Fox, Philip Jackson
15A
Patrick (Moe Dunford) is a 26-year old schizophrenic youth, who goes missing in the middle of in St Patrick’s Day festivities in Dublin, much to the alarm of his English mother Maura (Kerry Fox from Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table.)
As it happens, Patrick is being chatted up by the world-weary and cynical air hostesss, Karen (Catherine Walker). After some time spent on the town together they end up outside her bedroom door. Karen is some years older than Patrick, something she does not realise until she playfully lifts his St Patrick’s Day mask - Groucho Marx in a green wig. The fact that he is younger and that he is schizophrenic - which he tells her - does not stop her drunken seduction.
At the garda station Maura reports her son’s absence and meets the decidedly eccentric detective Freeman (Philip Jackson). He is diffident about the fact that Patrick...
Read Paddy Kehoe's full review here
Best of the Rest
Trash
4/5
Rating: 15A
Starring: Rooney Mara, Martin Sheen, Wagner Moura
Already labelled a Brazilian Slumdog Millionaire, this hugely enjoyable film may suffer from such comparisons (it's actually a much better movie) and the fact that a certain Richard Curtis wrote the screenplay, based on the novel by Andy Mulligan.
Sure, having Curtis involved may bring the odd spoonful of sugar to Trash, but that can't take away from a relentlessly-paced drama that, if comparisons are essential, reminds me more of Captain Phillips, in that it's an intense drama that boasts an immense performance from a central character played by a globally unknown actor. Only this time, the actors are three and they're all kids. Remarkable.
A wallet filled with incriminating evidence is thrown...
Read John Byrne's full review here
Ex Machina
Starring: Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander
15A
Alex Garland's directorial debut, Ex Machina is a taut, tense and elegant sci-fi thriller that is utterly compelling from start to finish.
Garland, best known for the screenplay for 28 Days Later and his book The Beach, takes the reins for this smart and stylish movie that explores the dangers of increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence for the human race, as well as the moral issues of man creating thinking beings.
Set in the not-too-distant future, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is a hotshot young coder working for Bluebook, the world's largest internet search engine. He wins an internal lottery in the company to spend a week with Bluebook's reclusive and mysterious CEO, Nathan (Oscar Isaac). After being flown by helicopter...
Read Sarah McIntyre's full review here
Big Hero 6
Starring: Ryan Potter, Scott Adsit, Daniel Henney, TJ Miller, Jamie Chung, Damon Wayans Jr, Genesis Rodriguez, James Cromwell, Alan Tudyk, Maya Rudolph
PG
Funny how as the years rack up you can get even more out of animated movies than you ever did when you had a lot more time on your side.
Here's a prime example, "a Disney movie with Marvel DNA," as producer Roy Conli puts it, that mixes superhero and sentiment and leaves you hankering to hug or hang out with a giant inflatable medical robot called Baymax. How can something that looks so simple have such a profound effect?
Set in San Fransokyo, Big Hero 6 follows the adventures of Hiro (Potter), a teenage robotics wunderkind who teams up...
Read Harry Guerin's full review here
