It's a bumper week this week with Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead, Idris Elba's action-thriller Bastille Day and the Gabriel Byrne-starring family drama Louder than Bombs among the movies opening.
Miles Ahead ***1/2
Director: Don Cheadle
Starring: Don Cheadle, Ewan McGregor, Emayatzy Corinealdi, Michael Stuhlbarg
Duration: 100 minutes | Cert: 15A
"Don't call my music jazz. It's social music. I am modal," grumbles Miles Davis in the opening scene of this helter skelter film about the jazz pioneer. It's a line that could very well apply to Miles Ahead; don't call Don Cheadle's film a biopic. It's far more modal than that.
Cheadle, who stars and directs, struggled to get the story onto the screen and thankfully he takes a fragmented and impressionistic approach to his wily subject. If his aim was to somehow capture the lightning-in-a bottle quality of the music, he has largely succeeded. Miles Ahead is a free-wheeling and ramshackle affair that manages, between car chases, shoot outs, and industrial drug use, to nail Miles Davis, the mercurial genius and the arrogant badass.
We first encounter him living in...
Read Alan Corr's full review here.
Bastille Day ***1/2
Director: James Watkins
Starring: Idris Elba, Richard Madden, Kelly Reilly
Duration: 92 minutes | Cert: 15A
Frankly, this film had me sold at Idris Elba. I'd watch a film of him reading the menu from his local Chinese takeaway, so I'm hopelessly biased, and have been since the Stringer Bell days of The Wire.
Anyway: the plot. It's way better than a takeaway menu. And there's no MSG, just plenty of thrills and spills. Could've done with a little more meat, though.
Michael Mason (Richard Madden, Robb Stark in Game of Thrones) is an American pickpocket living in Paris who finds himself a suspected terrorist in the sights of the CIA when he steals...
Read John Byrne's full review here.
Louder than Bombs ***1/2
Director: Joachim Trier
Starring: Gabriel Byrne, Isabelle Huppert, Devin Druid, Jesse Eisenberg
Duration: 109 minutes | Cert: 15A
Louder than Bombs is teetering on the edge of greatness but it has a ways to go yet. The film is led manfully - and woman-fully - to that edge by Gabriel Byrne as Gene, the embattled father and one-time actor, and Isabelle Huppert as Isabelle, the mother and war photographer of the piece.
Both these veteran actors do their best with material that is, for much of the time, impressively woven, but also at times patchily pretentious.
However, director Joachim Trier is a bold experimenter with flashback and what we call around here 'interesting camera angle art'. Along with that, he infuses as much eccentricity as possible into his lead character, the tormented young adolescent Conrad (Devin Druid) whose...
Read Paddy Kehoe's full review here.
Friend Request **1/2
Director: Simon Verhoeven
Starring: Alycia Debnam-Carey, William Moseley, Connor Paolo, Brit Morgan, Brooke Markham, Liesl Ahlers
Duration: 92 minutes | Cert: 15A
Friend Request is an above average social media-themed horror movie that entertains throughout, with enough jump scares to keep your heartbeat racing, and a few unintentionally funny moments thrown in for good measure.
It follows Laura (Alycia Debnam-Carey), a twenty-something, internet-addicted college student. She is effortlessly popular, as demonstrated by her 800+ Facebook friends; and seemingly has the perfect life, as demonstrated by stylish and slickly-done montages of her online profile. She racks up the Facebook friends with ease, a stark contrast to her fellow psych class student Marina (Liesl Ahlers), who has, like, no friends at all, and tends to stare at her intensely across the lecture room.
Laura makes the fatal error of...
Read Sarah McIntyre's full review here.
Still Showing:
The Jungle Book ****
Director: Jon Favreau
Starring: Neel Sethi, Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong'o, Scarlett Johansson, Giancarlo Esposito, Christopher Walken, Garry Shandling
Duration: 105 minutes | Cert: PG
The great quote about Hollywood is that nobody knows anything - but that extends far beyond studio bigwigs to the punters too. How many of us, for example, decided on very early looks that Guardians of the Galaxy would be way-off cosmic, only for Disney-Marvel to turn in the best summer movie of 2014?
It's the same with Iron Man director Jon Favreau's version of The Jungle Book. For all the green screen wizardry and great casting, didn't Disney's remake feel like it could be one giant, if you'll pardon the pun, banana skin?
Well, the only slip here would be in not going to see Favreau's film because he proves that there's plenty of...
Read Harry Guerin's full review here.
Our Little Sister *****
Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Starring: Haruka Ayase, Kaho, Masami Nagasawa, Suzu Hirose
Duration: 126 minutes | Cert: PG
Our Little Sister is such a touching, engaging human story that it may well invite the curse of the Hollywood remake. So, while there is still time, go see the original. Adapted from Yoshida Akimi's best-selling graphic novel Umimachi Diary, it is a curiously heart-warming film, despite its vein of ongoing domestic tension.
A modest house in a quiet corner of the seaside city of Kamakura in Japan becomes the stage for scenes of affection - and some acrimony - between three sisters, as the past comes to haunt.
The story begins as Sachi (Haruka Ayase), Chika (Kaho) and Yoshino (Masami Nagasawa) attend...
Read Paddy Kehoe's full review here.
My Name is Emily ***
Director: Simon Fitzmaurice
Starring: Evanna Lynch, George Webster, Michael Smiley
Duration: 95 minutes | Cert: 12A
2016 is shaping up like our new favourite year for Irish movies. We've already had Room, Sing Street and Mammal and now comes writer-director Simon Fitzmaurice's debut My Name is Emily, an adapt-to-your-own-life story about mental health, memory and loss that offers something different across the generations. To say it's a dry-eye challenge is quite the understatement.
Evanna Lynch plays the teenager living the maelstrom of...
Read Harry Guerin's full review here.
Midnight Special ***
Director: Jeff Nichols
Starring: Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Adam Driver, Jaeden Lieberher
Duration: 112 minutes | Cert: 12A
It's almost more frustrating when a film draws you in from the get-go and shows real promise, only to drop the ball when it comes to the conclusion, than it is to watch a wholly middle-of-the-road flick. It's all about expectation management. Writer-director Jeff Nichols gives us the promise of something truly spectacular here, but fails to deliver in the final act, leaving the viewer with a sense of being cheated.
The ambiguities in this story - a boy on the run from a religious cult and a government agency - are where...
Read Sinead Brennan's full review here.
