X-Men: Apocalypse is this week's blockbuster, but if that's a bit too crash-bang-wallop for you there's the Tom Hanks-starring A Hologram for the King and Scottish island melodrama The Silent Storm too.
X-Men: Apocalypse **1/2
Director: Bryan Singer
Starring: James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, Oscar Isaac, Nicholas Hoult, Rose Byrne, Evan Peters, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Ben Hardy, Tye Sheridan
Duration: 144 minutes | Cert: 12A
At this stage, director Bryan Singer has become an expert in pressing all the right buttons in the ever-expanding multi-verse of the superhero flick. This is his fourth X-Men movie and the ninth in the franchise and Singer's talent for slow motion CGI sequences of cities being uprooted and blown away or vast containers tumbling balletically from transport ships is beginning to make Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay look like uncompromising auteurs.
But before we can savour the wanton destruction of Sydney Opera House and Brooklyn Bridge in X-Men: Apocalypse, we have to sit through more than an hour-and-a-half of screen time of back story and exposition. Clearly, Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg are anxious that we are up to speed with the X-Men series' torturous time shifts and story arcs before we can get down to the serious business of casual world destruction and dialogue delivered with clenched jaws and clenched buttocks.
And just in case you missed anything, we are even treated to...
Read Alan Corr's full review here.
A Hologram for the King ***
Director: Tom Tykwer
Starring: Tom Hanks, Alexander Black, Sarita Choudhury, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Tracey Fairaway, Jane Perry, Tom Skerritt
Duration: 138 minutes | Cert: 12A
The defining image in this curio from Cloud Atlas director Tom Tykwer is Tom Hanks as rumpled American businessman Alan Clay standing in full capitalist armour of business suit and briefcase at the edge of the Arabian Desert. The sun beats down and Clay is utterly lost. His whole life is unravelling around him as he loses the will to live during a make-or-break business trip.
He is in Saudi to flog new holographic projection software to a local king and Clay, at 55 years of age, is divorced and way past his mid-life crisis. In fact, he's on his third breakdown and in denial that this it - this is the rest of his life.
But it's the opening shot of Tykwer's movie that will really grab you. A Hologram for the King explodes into life with a...
Read Alan Corr's full review here.
The Silent Storm *
Director: Corinna McFarlane
Starring: Damian Lewis, Andrea Riseborough, Ross Anderson
Duration: 102 minutes | Cert: 16
Did post-Second World War Presbyterian minsters attending to ever-dwindling flocks on remote Scottish islands tend to be called Balor, surely a rather ominous Christian name? In the case of The Silent Storm, Damian Lewis plays the demented guilt-ridden Presbyterian minister of that name in this overwrought melodrama which sinks like a failed flan in the middle.
His wife Aislin (Andrea Riseborough) has been putting up for years with her husband's puritan, repressive strictures in their decidedly glum rectory. Moreover, the nasty secret she appears to have got right concerning their shared past doesn't help either. Indeed, when she has had enough of this control freak with a dog collar, she reminds him of the secret to his face in the middle of a huge domestic row.
In the middle of the row, a young 17-year-old delinquent orphan, named Fionn (Ross Anderson) suddenly...
Read Paddy Kehoe's full review here.
Still Showing
Green Room ****1/2
Director: Jeremy Saulnier
Starring: Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Patrick Stewart, Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner, Joe Cole, Mark Webber, Macon Blair, Eric Edelstein, Brent Werzner
Duration: 95 minutes | Cert: 16
One of the saddest cinematic trends of recent years has been the - for want of a better word - vanilla-isation of movies - where almost everything now falls into the 12-15A bracket and what's onscreen is as safe as those certs decree. Didn't there seem to be a lot more tough stuff back in the day?
If you think the same way, then Green Room will have you wiping many a tear from your eye - when you're not gripping the arm rest or buzz-sawing your nails down to the quick. It has been given a 16s cert here, but if ever a new release has felt like an 18s outing it's writer-director Jeremy Saulnier's vision of hell in the Pacific Northwest. Anyone who contends that genre movies just aren't gritty enough these days will be filling their (jack) boots here, and probably coming back for seconds.
Our heroes are The Ain't Rights, fierce exponents of the hand-to-mouth punk rock tradition who are trying to make their way back East by playing any gig that comes their way - and siphoning fuel from any vehicle en route. When the latest date turns into a diner-based disaster, the 'promoter' says he can hook them up with an afternoon show in a backwoods club. The money sounds good, but there's a very big catch...
Read Harry Guerin's full review here.
Everybody Wants Some!! ****
Director: Richard Linklater
Starring: Blake Jenner, Will Brittain, Zoey Deutch, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin, Glen Powell, and Wyatt Russell
Duration: 117 minutes | Cert: 15A
What we have here is a bit of a Back to the Future job for writer/director Richard Linklater. It comes on the cinematic coat-tails of his highly acclaimed Boyhood, which took the 'coming of age' genre to the ultimate by spending 12 years following a boy's development from the age of six to 18. This one feels like a follow-up to his breakthrough movie, Dazed and Confused, although Linklater also insists it's a sequel to Boyhood.
Well, it is his film. And it's a damn fine one, too.
Set in 1980, Everybody Wants Some!! follows the fortunes of Jake (Blake Jenner), a college freshman just out of high school. He's a promising pitcher and - as is the norm in US colleges - he moves into a house filled with other members of the college baseball team, and gets acquainted with...
Read John Byrne's full review here.
The Angry Birds Movie ****
Director: Clay Kaytis, Fergal Reilly
Starring: Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, Danny McBride, Peter Dinklage, Bill Hader, Sean Penn, Maya Rudolph, Kate McKinnon
Duration: 97 minutes | Cert: G
Sony Pictures didn't exactly cover itself in gaming glory with last summer's arcade-inspired adventure Pixels - a film so short on magic that not even the presence of Game of Thrones' Peter Dinklage could save it. Nearly a year on, however, the studio has got its joy shtick just right with this snarky-yet-sweet spin-off from the best-selling squawk-em-up - ironically, Dinklage is even part of the voice cast.
The plot finds explosive loner Red (Jason Sudeikis) sent to anger management classes after a particularly bad day at work. While determined to keep himself to himself, he ends up with wingmen Chuck (Josh Gad) and Bomb (Danny McBride), another two misfits who can't just let it be(ak). Soon, Red discovers that his temper could, in fact, be an asset when...
Read Harry Guerin's full review here.
Mustang ****
Director: Deniz Gamze Ergüven
Starring: Günes Sensoy, Doga Zeynep Doguslu, Tugba Sunguroglu
Duration: 97 minutes | Cert: 15A
Deniz Gamze Ergüven's impressive debut Mustang is brightly contemporary in its small-town setting, yet the family guardians at the heart of it are coldly unflinching in their strict adherence to tradition. Federico Garcia Lorca's classic Spanish play The House of Bernardo Alba - itself adapted as an equally impressive film by Carlos Saura - must have surely inspired this work, which glows and pulses with a lifeforce that is cruelly suppressed in the interests of family honour.
Five adolescent daughters are effectively locked up after a neighbour reports that they have been horse-playing with boys at the nearby beach in provincial Turkey. Bars are put on the windows and walls heightened, as the grandmother and her son oversee the girls' incarceration. Mother and son are guardians to the girls, although guarding is a moot point given...
Read Paddy Kehoe's full review here.
Our Kind of Traitor ***
Director: Susanna White
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Stellan Skarsgård, Damien Lewis, Naomie Harris, Mark Stanley, Mark Gatiss, Alicia von Rittberg, Saskia Reeves
Duration: 107 minutes | Cert: 15A
With the irresistible force of a hurtling bowling ball, the great Stellan Skarsgård scatters everyone - friend or foe - like skittles in this handsome-looking Le Carré adaptation from Generation Kill director Susanna White. He plays Dima, a great bear of a man who tries to go clear when his job as a kingpin money launderer for the Russian Mafia endangers him and his brood of a family.
Quite by chance, he meets innocents abroad - Ewan McGregor as emasculated poetry professor Perry; and Naomie Harris as his estranged wife, Gail - a fast-rising lawyer. Dima befriends them with his force-of-nature charisma and entrusts them with a vital USB for the British Secret Service. With their help, he hopes to...
Read Alan Corr's full review here.
