films
Bring Them Down
There’s nothing subtle about Bring Them Down, but this is a mightily impressive debut, bringing something of the sanguinary spirit of Sam Peckinpah to the fields of Wicklow.
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The Fire Inside
It’s never in doubt that Ressa will eventually get her big payday, but The Fire Inside brings fresh power to its familiar beats.
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The Seed of the Sacred Fig
The film laboriously builds to a dramatically satisfying conclusion, but it’s the handheld footage of teenage girls boldly standing up to revolutionary guards that stays with you.
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Hard Truths
Pansy seems on the verge of a breakthrough, a realisation that might finally allow her some relief, but Leigh isn’t about to allow us any pat dramatic resolution.
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The Brutalist
There’s something of Scott Walker’s madly ostentatious Europhilia to the film, his insistence that the pop song could be a church broad enough to welcome Bergman, Stockhausen, Brel and Pasolini.
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A Complete Unknown
There is lightning in many of the performances, but as a film A Complete Unknown never goes fully electric.
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A Real Pain
Eisenberg's script is brought to life by an electric performance from Kieran Culkin, who adds depth to his own actorly niche as the charming, hyperactive and exhaustingly chaotic Benji.
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Nickel Boys
Adaptation feels too tame a word for what Ross is up to in this astonishing film. What he accomplishes here is on the level of the magic that Charlie Parker worked on the 12-bar blues
films
Suede: the insatiable ones
The mundane reality of addiction, it turns out, is not Byronic wraiths in Ghormenghast mansions but a pie-eyed Anderson plonking atonally on a cheap synth, vainly trying to compose Head Music.