Having bagged an Oscar for the angst-ridden Brokeback Mountain, director ANG LEE lightens the tone with his new movie, a paean to the Woodstock festival. He explains why he chose to honour the high-point of hippy culture
A compellingly grouchy character study and a banging geriatric revenge thriller, Harry Brown offers Michael Caine plenty of opportunities for tough guy thespian showboating.
This fabulous steampunk epic set in an unspecified post-apocalyptic future sees ‘stitchpunk’ puppets – the last evidence of human life - take on rampant killing machines.
Some of the best movies currently being made are coming from the near east, specifically Turkey and Romania. CRISTIAN MUNGIU, director of the astonishing, Ceausescu-era set 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days and the forthcoming Tales from the Golden Age talks about the new wave of Romanian cinema.
Tara Brady talks to uber-hip actor - and scion of the Coppola clan - Jason Schwartzman about his latest film with cult director Wes Anderson, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox.
The Vampire’s Assistant could pass for a Bosco Halloween episode. This is, contrary to the crummy production design, meant to be an epic tale of good versus evil.
Tara Brady talks to director Pete Docter about the latest Pixar mega-hit Up, which tells the story of an elderly widower who sets sail on an Amazonian adventure.
Directed by Ricky Gervais. Starring Jason Bateman, Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill, Tina Fey, Ricky Gervais, Rob Lowe, Stephen Merchant, Christopher Guest, Jeffrey Tambor, Fionnula Flanagan.
The sex lives of flamingos may seem an unusual premise for a Disney nature film but documentarians MATTHEW AEBERHAND and LENDER WARD weave cinematic magic from this most unlikely of source materials.
He’s swapped the American Office for Hollywood, been touched by the hand of George Clooney and scrawled his name all over a house in Kerry. Tara Brady meets awesomely nice Away We Go star John Burke Krasinski.
LIAM CLANCY is in sparkling form as he looks forward to the release of a documentary on his life, which explains how he escaped the Irish Ayatollahs and wowed a young Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village.
WALK ON THE WILDE SIDE
Directed by Oliver Parker. Starring Ben Barnes, Colin Firth, Ben Barnes, Rebecca Hall, Ben Chaplin, Emilia Fox, Rachel Hurd-Wood. [112mins. Cert 16]
Directed by Greg Mottola. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Ryan Reynolds, Martin Starr, Bill Hader, and Kristen Wiig. [107mins. Cert 16.]
Opens September 11
KATHRYN BIGELOW is one of the few women directors to break through the glass ceiling in Hollywood. What’s more, she makes action movies of a kind not normally associated with ‘girls’. The release of her latest meisterwerk, The Hurt Locker, an extraordinary movie about the activities of a US Army bomb disposal unit in the war in Iraq, sees her being tipped as a contender come Oscar season next year.
Jaume Collet-Serra’s exhilarating horror-thriller eschews the chin-stroking of early bad seed B-movies, but retains enough classicism to stand out as an exemplar of the sub-genre.
The son of a certain well-known ’70s rock star, DUNCAN JONES is clearly something of a chip off the old block: his new movie is a sweet, low budget space oddity that harks back to the golden age of sci-fi. He talks about growing up in the Bowie household and escaping his father’s shadow.
Father Ted writer Arthur Mathews talks about his latest movie, Wide Open Spaces, an evocation of "Crap Ireland", set in a Famine theme park, with shades of Flann O’Brien and Beckett.
This is a film of secrets and lies, of repressed memories and strange displacements in a chick flick in the very best sense of that sadly devalued term
While the plot is not quite what it was in Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen's new character – flamboyant, gay Austrian fashion TV presenter Brüno – is still funny as hell.
He may have just re-launched his stuttering acting career with a charming Ken Loach rom-com but that’s not to say Eric Cantona has lost any of his zen instructability.
She has spent her life being defined by the men around her - as daughter of Arthur Miller and wife of Daniel Day Lewis. With the release of her big screen adaptation of her novel, The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee, Rebecca Miller proves that she is very much her own woman.
It’s not just because the script features some of the most imaginatively profane subtitles I have ever had the pleasure to read. This is that rarest of comic delights
The director plays the crime for maximum grisliness, though long before the final atrocities, there is the horror of helplessness, of civilians sandwiched between German and Russian troops in Kraków, of terrible events happening faster than anyone can process.
In the first film we get Megan Fox dry humping a car. But now here’s Megan dry-humping a bike, shaking her hair out of motorcycle helmet in slow motion and pouting with lips that seem to have expanded since the first movie.
Like The Reader, Fugitive Pieces avoids the messier aspects of that historical tragedy, in favour of cutesy-pie kids, breathtaking scenery, eye-wateringly cheesy sex scenes and completely inauthentic period detail.
Last House, remember, is no mere brainless cut-‘em-up but a twisted reworking of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring from the same gentlemen who went on to direct Meryl Streep in Music Of The Heart.
Having made his name with the cult movie Tarnation, Jonathan Caouette has taken his career in an unexpected new direction with a movie about, of all things, an indie-rock festival, namely England’s All Tomorrow’s Parties.
This is straightforward rollicking comedy done to perfection. We don’t just laugh with these guys, we laugh at them, near them, beside them and occasionally, right through the nose.
Tired of choosing between sequels and prequels? Now you don’t have to. Terminator Salvation does both jobs in the same running time as leading rival products.
Five mathematically minded boffins receive mysterious invitations to a remote barn where they must solve tricky sums in order to prevent trick walls from closing in and making them into brainy pate.
Having revolutionised television with Lost, wunderkind producer J.J. ABRAMS has now focused his sights on the ailing Star Trek franchise. But can a ‘Trek agnostic really breathe fresh life into the most famous brand in science fiction? And will his gamble of casting relative unknowns as the iconic Enterprise crew come off?
Jim Sturgess has attracted plenty of attention for his pin-up good looks and ability to master accents. He’s now further proved his diversity by adopting a Northern Irish brogue for high octane Belfast thriller 50 Dead Men Walking
The recent press conference for Marley And Me found the film’s stars, tabloid fixture Jennifer Aniston and suicide attempt survivor Owen Wilson, grudgingly going through the motions in front of a crowd of tentative journalists. You could say there was some awkwardness in the room
Unhappily, W.C. has little to recommend it. Perhaps if the writer-director-multi-hyphenate was more collaborative, there would have been someone around to say ‘when’ and knock it into shape.
There is some predictable tomfoolery involving chewed furniture and an obedience school run by Kathleen Turner, but Marley And Me sneaks up and coalesces into something unexpected.
Gran Torino is less weighty than Clint’s previous movie, The Changeling. But this poignant, tremendously entertaining film is how we’ll likely remember him.
Three Monkeys marks another Great Leap forward for the former photographer Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The narrative is gripping, the performances are poignant and the stylistic repertoire is flawless.
In his debut novel writer – and Hot Press scribe – Peter Murphy has created a whole new genre, Irish South-Eastern Gothic. Set in his native Wexford, John The Revelator chronicles a troubled teenager's coming of age against a backdrop of rural strife and spiritual turmoil. He talks about the life upheavals that inspired the book – and explains why he draws inspiration from America's renegade writers rather than Ireland's kitchen-sink literary tradition.
He’s the Latin smoothie who has wooed a gaggle of starlets, Scarlett Johansson among them. But Benicio del Toro shows a different side to his persona with his controversial new portrayal of South American revolutionary Che Guevara.
A vehicle fashioned around its consistently excellent star, Benicio del Toro, the slight hum you hear throughout isn’t just artillery in the distance, it’s Oscar buzz.
Hunter S. Thompson gets the biopic treatment he deserves courtesy of Oscar-winning director Alex Gibny who wants to remind the world just how important a social commentator the Great Gonzo was.
Hunter S. Thompson gets the biopic treatment he deserves courtesy of Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney who wants to remind the world how important the Great Gonzo was.
They've earned a reputation as catfighting divas. But in person Sugababes turn out to be absolute sweethearts. New 'bab' Amelle Berraba talks about fame and dodging the papparazi.
Although there's not much room for surprises, this biography of the life and times of current US President George W Bush offers an entertaining re-enactment.
Despite its lofty language, this film appears to have been made on a TV production budget. But it still boasts an interesting plotline and a convincing heroine.
From psychedelic anime to Japan's answer to Trainspotting, the Japanese Film Festival 2008 brings a delightful miscellany of movies to Dublin, Cork and Limerick.
Action movie sweetheart and FHM-proclaimed second sexiest woman on the planet Jessica Biel gives us the lowdown on upcoming period rom-com Easy Virtue... and nothing else.
Not your everyday coming of age story, this Turkish film is one that teases your psyche with the dramas of adolescence in the midst of exotic locations.
After the release of HSM3, choreographer and director Kenny Ortega tells us why the restrictive family values parameters only inspire him to be more creative.
Quantum of Solace director Mark Forester explains how he wanted to rehabilitate the James Bond franchise with a nod towards classic '70s post-Watergate conspiracy thrillers such as The Parallax View and The Conversation
He found fame with his dorky turn in The Office. Now Rainn Wilson is trying to make it on the big screen. And yes, he's aware that it's easier said than done.
From child actress to Emmy and Oscar-winning veteran, Helen Hunt exhibits Streep-like intelligence and versatility. She's now about to make her directorial debut with Then She Found Me.
Seth Rogen is one of the team of stoners behind a string of comedies that have generated a billion dollars at the box office. Pineapple Express is the latest.
It requires no great talent to reduce an audience to tears when your backdrop is a concentration camp. If your principals are potato-headed children, so much the better.
The Icelandic tourist board may never recover from Jar City, a gloomy, riveting police thriller that might as well come with billboards instructing would-be travellers to abandon all hope.
He's the Hollywood enfant terrible who refuses to mellow with age. In a rare interview, John Waters talks about the aesthetics of trash, and looks back on his career.
Though ostensibly based on William Saroyan’s 1953 novella ‘The Laughing Matter’, Zvyagintsev’s film seeks to reenact nothing less than the Fall of Man.
Comedy genius Will Ferrell turns out to be just as funny in the flesh as he is on screen, albeit far droller. Let's hear it for the world's greatest living Longford man.
It’s 1979 in Dublin and 13 year-old Maeve (Ailish McCarthy) is, in accordance with the Darwinian laws of the playground, hoping to get her first bra before all her other mates do.
Even before we get through the opening credits, a Molotov of freak show lettering, crude animations and Ennio Morricone’s galloping theme, you know you’re in the Western’s answer to Latin mass.
The alchemy is all out of whack here. Take Steve Carell’s agent, who occasionally falls over but who, in defiance of the ironic title, is actually quite smart.
If you imagined that writer-director Guillermo del Toro couldn’t top the occultist Nazis, demon-spawn puppy love and super kitsch of the original film, then think again.
A squeaky clean Flashdance aimed squarely at the tweenie market, Make It Happen wouldn’t know an original idea if it came up and danced the hoochie cooch in its face.
As New Queer Cinema pioneer TOM KALIN returns with his long awaited second film Savage Grace, starring Julianne Moore, he reflects on the mainstreaming of the marginal.
Superficially, director Olly Blackburn’s debut conforms to the morality play template - somewhere in the low budget murk, there’s a neat little boat thriller.
Advertising maestro, Warhol/Burroughs associate and portrait photographer BRUCE WEBER talks about his re-released biopic of jazz lost-boy Chet Baker, Let's Get Lost.
Batman and the Joker seem to be battling for our very souls but, really, they're simply setting things up for supercharged action, as Christopher Nolan delivers the superhero film of the season.
City Of Men allows you to enjoy the gun totting favelas and favelados as they strut around the streets of Rio De Janeiro without ever allowing you to forget that their lives are hellish and brief.
Richard Jenkins has diligently plied his craft for Woody Allen, the Coen Brothers and in Six Feet Under, but he's now assuming his first leading role in Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, we don’t know either. If like us, you’ve been watching the trailers for Hancock with a furrowed brow and a wavy line mouth, you are not alone.
Just when you started to suspect that The Shawshank Redemption was a remarkable fluke, up pops Frank Darabont with one of the most discombobulating adaptations of Steven King literature since The Shining.
The new installment in the Narnia franchise, Prince Caspian, is burdened by huge commercial expectations. But the film's director, Andrew Adamson, is not letting the pressure get to him.
Financed by a maxed out credit card and shot in black and white, In Search Of A Midnight Kiss is precisely what we expect – nay, demand – from our indie schmindie movies.
It was one of the most influential TV programmes of the past decade. But its return, this time on the big screen, has stirred up a veritable hornet's nest.
Having scored success with their TV series Pure Mule, director Declan Recks and playwright Eugene O’Brien have re-teamed for this fine award-winning drama.
The most ardent Allen admirers, the most feverish Farrell fanatics, would be hard pressed to love this humdrum riff on Crimes And Misdemeanours. Yes. Another one.
This is not “the Indiana movie that you were dreading.” Though it’s not nearly as good as the trilogy that went before, Crystal Skull is, undeniably, quite good fun.
Jeff Nichol’s remarkable directorial debut combines grand dynastic saga and Southern gothic for a compelling tale of fighting, feuding half-brothers in a depressed Southeast Arkansas town.
Forget Beirut as a byword for urban warfare, the Lebanese director of Caramel, Nadine Labaki, is looking towards the future through the lens of a beauty salon.
Documentarian Morgan Spurlock takes it upon himself to track down America's Public Enemy Number 1 in his new film Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden?
Hard-drinking cinematographer Christopher Doyle's latest film, Gus Van Sant's dark drama Paranoid Park, saw him make a rare excursion Stateside, but he certainly hasn't curbed any of his excesses
Hollywood has been encroaching on the Marvel-verse since 1944 when children handed over jam-jars to catch the first serialised version of Captain America.
When Clooney and Zelweger are together, it’s tumbleweeds not sparks that fly. Still, it’s hard to entirely resist Clooney when he’s batting his eyelashes in our direction.
This ought to be a series of thrilling monkeyshines to be accompanied by popcorn and Revels. But 21 can’t make ‘action’ at the tables look any more exciting than completing a tax return.
If you’re in recovery from a head trauma or just jonesing for some prime Hollywood cheese might we point you in the direction of Awake, a suspenseful thriller with more holes in its story than Gary Condit and O.J. Simpson combined.
Following the familial disquiet of Benny’s Video, the creeping dread of Hidden and Isabella Huppert’s unlikely shenanigans in The Piano Teacher, we’ve grown accustomed to the perversities of Michael Haneke.
She spent years struggling with bit-parts and support roles. But now Naomi Watts is a Hollywood player, in the same league as her friend Nicole Kidman.
She was once voted "Britain's sexiest blonde". But Jennifer Ellison is more interested in furthering her acting reputation than becoming a lad-mag pin-up.
A water polo match between Hungary and the Soviet Union might seem an unlikely springboard for a moving meditation on freedom and oppression, but Children Of Glory director Krisztina Goda has pulled it off.
On the eve of the release of Martin McDonagh's In Bruges, A-list actors Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson give Hot Press the idiot's guide to making it in the movie business.
Although critics have discerned all manner of political and religious significance in There Will Be Blood, director Paul Thomas Anderson insists that it's a horror film about the birth of California.
"Reinvigorated by lightweight digital technology the master craftsman goes back to the drawing board and unleashes the undead into our streets as if for the first time."
Never ones to be left behind the times, Bono and chums have gone 3D with the release of U2 3D. Director Catherine Owens gives us the inside track on the historic project.
He's famed for his method-acting obsessiveness and supposed reclusive streak. But could the real secret about Daniel Day-Lewis be that he's actually rather normal?
"We should be in the middle of an epic battle. We barely get handbags at dawn. It’s almost as if Jumper doesn’t believe in the universe it seeks to create."
Self-styled sex siren Diablo Cody has moved into the mainstream with the acclaimed, Oscar-nominated Juno. What’s more, the movie is so good, she might just prove to be a winner.
"A wonderful screenplay by current Hollywood darling Diablo Cody is jollied along by naturalistic profanities and idiosyncrasies that are smiled on but never mocked."
"Aspiring to the condition of theme park ride, none of it makes a lick a sense but its hyperactive ‘and then’ quality at least ensures you won’t be bored."
"Many filmmakers would be happy enough with the worthiness of the material but Schnabel and Spielberg’s regular cinematographer Janusz Kaminski do astonishing work here."
"The characterisation is just as detailed as the beautifully drawn backgrounds and the film commendably concludes that all races need to get down together."
"Cloverfield is, as the pitch and poster suggests, Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project and the shocks are made all the more potent by the trivial world they intrude upon."
After a pair of critical and commercial misfires, Joel and Ethan Coen have returned with what many critics are hailing as the best film of their career, the dark noir No Country For Old Men.
"Sweeney Todd, a masterpiece of misanthropy, sees Mr. Burton put away his childish things for a declaration to rival James Whale’s most famous lightning bolt shot."
"...the Coen brothers work their magic unseen. They’ve always been too secure in their talents to bother with showboating and here their deft touch has never seemed surer."
"The occasionally twinkling score, dewy-eyed foundlings and Dickensian plotting leave you in little doubt that we’re in feel good fairy-tale territory."
"Like The Pogues gig on the other side of Xmas, The Frames at Vicar Street on New Year’s Eve is now a fixture of the season and quite the place to be."
Ahead of the release of his new movie, Irish boxing melodrama Strength And Honour, Michael Madsen reflects on a career that been sometimes troubled but never boring.
Fresh from the success of ‘Shrooms, in which she has a leading role, Lindsey Haun shoots the breeze about music, film and growing up as the daughter of a soft-rock legend.
A strange hybrid of supernatural thriller and magic realist soap opera, it's no wonder this galloping hokum is the third biggest grossing title of all time in its native Mexico.
Nobody will mistake this with a great screen weepie, but Holly’s compellingly narcissistic, Oprah-fied ‘journey’ will surely do for right here, right now.
In 1990, 22 year-old college graduate Christopher McCandless donated his $24,000 in savings to Oxfam and hit the road. Two years later he died in Alaska, after approximately 112 days in the wild. Legendary actor and director Sean Penn tells the story in his fourth film Into The Wild.
Swords fly, blood splatters and comely wenches wobble like never before in glorious motion capture animation. You wonder why the filmmaker didn’t, you know, go and make a real film.
A terrific boy’s own adventure shot through with Herzog’s deliciously dark wit and Bale’s unnerving rawness, in a season of mind numbing Iraq movies, this is the war film to beat.
Frank Oz may be the man behind those cuddly muppets, but he’s no pushover in person. Now, his chequered career as a director culminates in the darkly comic Death At A Funeral.
It’s a brave move to fashion a film featuring such dislikeable people. Unhappily, that doesn’t make The Witnesses any easier to emotionally engage with.
The Dark Is Rising, an adaptation of Susan Cooper’s massively influential children’s classic, is a big, plodding dud that bares little or no resemblance to the book that inspired it.
On the back of five years’ worth of movies that either overtly or covertly address Iraq and the War On Terror, Rendition feels a little late coming out of the starting gates.
As one half of gross-out movie kings the Farrelly Brothers, Bobby Farrelly turned bodily humour into an art form. Now the Farrellys have reunited with actor Ben Stiller for their funniest film in years, The Heartbreak Kid.
Hilary and Jackie director Anand Tucker’s latest film And When Did You Last See Your Father is an even more heartbreaking version of the story first told in Blake Morrison’s memoir of the same name.
Former Friends star David Schwimmer talks about his dark days of waiting tables and why his lawyer parents were perturbed by his determination to make it as an actor.
Having come to prominence as an Oscar-standard character actor in films such as American Beauty, Adaptation and Capote, straight-shooting Chris Cooper now plays America’s worst ever spy in Breach
Mikael Håfström’s splendidly camp and genuinely spooky movie is adapted from a short story that’s so recognisably Stephen King, it might have been written by somebody else.
From Taxi Driver and Raging Bull to The Last Temptation Of Christ and his latest leftfield masterpiece The Walker, Paul Schrader has gifted us a succession of Hollywood’s finest moments. Here he talks to Tara Brady about the changing face of film, lying to the FBI and his admiration for the late Ingmar Bergman.
The Walker, though occasionally hindered by its micro-budget and tax-busting Isle Of Man location shoot, is a worthy addition to a quadrilogy that includes Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and Light Sleeper.
A feminist wish-fulfilment fantasy with a heart to match its slyly cerebral qualities, you’d need to be a fiercely impervious piece of work not to swoon for Waitress.
Motherhood has done little to diminish maria doyle kennedy‘s snarling rock chick attitude. Here, she talks about censorship, Chuck Palahniuk and how she’s managed to balance music with big-league acting.
From Nikki Blonsky’s bravura opening number, the delightfully subversive ‘Good Morning, Baltimore’, Adam Shankman’s musical extravaganza simply never lets up.
In the Port-au-Prince shanty Cité Soleil, “the most dangerous place on earth”, the violent youths employed to do the bidding of then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide are called chimeres or ghosts. The name is apt; those who aren’t dead soon will be.
Unlike most Hollywood remakes, the new version of Hairspray succeeds in being as deliciously camp as the John Waters original. One of its young stars, Amanda Bynes, talks to Tara Brady about the joys of getting hot and sweaty with John Travolta.
Sadly, Phoenix is woefully short on incident. In the absence of any real narrative thrust, the film instead concerns itself with interpersonal intricacies.
Though Dans Paris does sporadically achieve a kind of emotional honesty, mostly you want to give everyone a good shake and tell them to get on with it.
Cecilia Peck, director of music documentary-political travelogue Dixie Chicks: Shut Up And Sing reminisces about her Dingle childhood and explains what it’s like being part of a great Hollywood dynasty.
This is a work composed of 18 separate segments by 18 different directors, so naturally it's all over the place. Happily, each work runs no longer than seven minutes, so if you’re not happy there’ll be another one along in a minute.
Based on the life of Scottish amateur cyclist Graeme Obree, this fantastically moving biopic covers the period of Obree’s life that saw him take, lose, and then retake the world one-hour distance record.
Twelve years since he retired his blood-stained Die Hard vest, Bruce Willis is back for another bite at the franchise. He talks about his see-saw acting career and why he and ex-wife Demi Moore will always be friends.
By the end of Shrek 2, we had just about enough of that franchise’s snarky pop-culture references to do us a lifetime. Sadly, Shrek The Third picks up where its predecessor left off.
30th Anniversary Retrospective: From indie flicks to Hollywood classics, Irish gems to world cinema masterpieces, Tara Brady here selects the top 101 films of the past 30 years.
Eric Bana plays a pro-poker player hoping to buy into the World Series. When he meets waitress Drew Barrymore, it’s an excuse for a dreary tutorial on the devil’s picture book and a million poker-as-life metaphors.
The Satellite Party are a confused electro-supergroup featuring Perry Farrell, a couple of Chilli Peppers and that awful shouty woman from the Black Eyed Peas. And this is a classic side-project, commendably surging onwards...
Beauty And Crime might not convert the masses but it’d be nice to think there’s a place for such literate otherworldliness in the big, bad game of rock.
A biopic of the French Judy Garland? How perfectly fabulous, I hear you cry. Certainly, the life of Edith Piaf, the shrewish chanteuse who was born in a whorehouse and raised on the streets, would put Courtney Love to shame.
Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 docudrama The Battle Of Algiers, which depicted events from the Algerian rebellion against the French between 1954 and 1960, is a masterpiece of cinema and a crucial text on terrorism. The DVD release introduces this classic to the War On Terror generation.
Adapted from the crime novel by Harlan Coben Tell No One is a plot-driven Running Man mystery that frequently pounds along like Dan Brown after an enforced stint in Literacy Camp.
Ten Canoes weaves together a string of bawdy jokes to create a richly textured folk-tale, deftly demonstrating that accessible and funny doesn’t have to mean retarded.
Unlike vaguely acceptable horror remakes The Amityville Horror and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this latest chunk of carrion is distinguished only by rank uselessness.
Tracing Scott Walker’s journey from reluctant 60s teen idol to leftfield dignitary, this award-winning doc should please both neophytes and dedicated champions alike.
Driven out of India while filming her latest film. Water, Deepa Mehta talks about protests, effigies and the controversy that follows her wherever she goes.
Where Hostel delivered its warning with a degree of subtlety – or as much as you can get when characters are hacked to pieces with drills – Paradise Lost puts its message in giant neon letters.
Black Snake Moan exists somewhere between the timeless depression era shanties of Zora Neale Hurston’s folk-tales, the King James Bible and a Jerry Springer confessional.
Funnymen David Mitchell and Robert Webb crown their rise to the comedy top-table with Magicians, a uproarious tale of two entertainers seeking to keep alive the spirit of Paul Daniels.
The legacy of a punk great is scrutinised in a new documentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten. Filmmaker Julien Temple explains what motivated him to make a movie about his old friend.
She has the bearing of a 19th-Century aristocrat but, face to face, Keira Knightley is nobody’s princess. Here she talks about starring in Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End and explains why, for her at least, it really is time to jump overboard from the franchise.
If you hate middle-class French comedies or if you are not possessed with a boundless enthusiasm for dinner-party japes, then My Best Friend might drive you gibbering toward the nearest secure hospital.
Based on the book Goodbye Bafana: Nelson Mandela, My Prisoner, My Friend, the film charts the unlikely friendship between Robben Island’s most famous inmate and the official who censored his letters.
The creator of cinema’s lost peyote sacraments, mime master, graphic novelist, the man who married Marilyn Manson and Dita Von Teese, and the secret architect of Dune and Alien, 78-year-old Alejandro Jodorowsky is a counter-cultural legend.
Fashioning an Altmanesque daisy-chain around the mucky pathways travelled by Schlosser, Fast Food Nation attempts to ape the multi-layered, global narrative of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic.
We knew there was little danger of getting crushed in the mosh pit this evening but only a stint in a nunnery might have adequately prepared us for the heavy-curtained reverential silence of the Olympia.
She could have carved her niche as matinee totty but instead Catherine McCormack has followed her own route. Her latest movie, for instance, is a zombie flick freigthed with political overtones.
Excuse me? You can’t help but do a double take when you learn that Danny Dyer, wide boy idol of Human Traffic and Severance, has teamed up with Gillian Anderson for a sick vigilante fantasy.
Half Nelson reminds us how cool the independent sector used to be – two first-timers expand a 2004 short into a kick-arse screenplay, land the services of a super actor (Gosling) and end up with a dozen awards and an Oscar nod.
Young, hungry, professional film crews and equally young, beautiful and professional actors. What’s the Irish film industry come to? Just ask Speed Dating stars Nora Jane Noone and Hugh O’Conor.
From hayseed starlet to rookie director, Sarah Polley has certainly travelled a great distance, as demonstrated by her wrenching directorial debut Away From Her.
Shane Meadows, the ace writer-director behind A Room For Romeo Brass and Dead Man’s Shoes hasn’t steered us wrong yet, but This Is England is almost certainly his best work to date.
Waves of soldiers dressed in contrasting black and gold? Gilded corridors finished with crimson? Carpets of bright yellow chrysanthemums? Wow, this can only be a Zhang Yimou flick.
Actor Ray Liotta has a jaundiced view of the film industry and the media that feeds off it. But, as he proves in Wild Hogs, he can turn on the comedy too.
Unfolding like a freak show for the very best and worst of humanity, the ridiculously precocious director has fashioned historical grievances and iniquities into a modern classic.
Ferrell never lets a scene pass without adding a comic macho snarl or pelvic thrust. Heder is delightfully fey and goofy. If they’re ever looking to cast for Football In The Groin, I think we’ve found our guys.
The dream team behind zombie revivalist hit 28 Days Later – director Danny Boyle, screenwriter Alex Garland and ace thespian Cillian Murphy – reunite for a metaphysical speculative spectacle.
Schizophrenically skipping between low-rent grindhouse shoot-‘em-ups, family drama and political rants, The Caiman is an endearing, shouty gumbo even when the subplots don’t seem all that organic.
The last time we met Cillian Murphy he was fighting Black and Tans in west Cork. Now he’s the star of a lavish Danny Boyle space opera. Still, no matter what the subject matter, the actor keeps his feet firmly on the ground.
The outlaw French directors’ leading man of choice, Vincent Cassel is also a mainstay of the Kourtrajmé collective, husband to Monica Bellucci and the star of the comic-horror guerilla feature Satan.
The vogue for grainy verite and faux-monochrome in the post-Private Ryan war film has become so ubiquitous that one is constantly surprised watching the old-fashioned grammar of Days Of Glory.
After research into the cover-up of clerical sexual abuse Amy Berg was shocked to uncover the story of Father Ollie, the serial paedophile who agreed to participate in her film Deliver Us From Evil.
Following atrick Chamusso's arrest and torture for a crime he did not commit, he joined the African National Congress to become a freedom fighter for the cause. Catch A Fire, a political thriller based on Chamusso’s story.
This lively little biopic based on the life of anti-slavery pioneer and RSPCA founder William Wilberforce comes to us from Walden Media, the family-friendly corporation owned by Philip Anschutz, an oil magnate and Christian philanthropist.
Retrosexuals ahoy. Like Sin City, Zack Snyder’s pounding adaptation of Frank Miller’s Greco-Roman graphic novel falls somewhere between live action and anime had the illustrations been provided by Tom of Finland.
Indie-hit Once director John Carney talks to Tara Brady about how to make an Irish musical, while star Glen Hansard confesses he was pleasantly surprised at the film’s success.
Small, sweet and winner of the World Cinema Audience Award at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, Once provides as touching a relationship as any movie since Before Sunset.
He might be quite the cove but Leslie Phillips is also an enduring presence in British cinema. Here he talks about co-staring with Peter O'Toole in Venus and explains why he had to leave his working class background behind to get a foothold in acting.
If you can ignore the unnecessarily modern intrusions and a lead actress who, though capable, looks like she's just walked off a Maybelline commercial, then Becoming Jane is a real joy.
How you take toward the latest bit of aggro from Football Factory director Nick Love depends entirely on your tolerance for hearing phrases like “Oi, you cants”.
With little difficulty Hilary Duff and her sister Hayley play pretty, silly, rich girls who are forced to fend for themselves when their late daddy’s cosmetic empire gets into legal trouble.
Of all the films in all the theatres in all the world, Casablanca is the single biggest fluke of the lot; a shining testimonial to William Goldman’s supposition that, in movies, nobody knows anything
A breathtaking work of socially conscious surrealism, Buñuel’s unromantic portrait of Mexican slum life in 1950 has lost none of its clout in the years since it first appeared.
A mess but a pretty Resnais-inspired mess, The energetically baffling Science Of Sleep stars Gael Garcia Bernal as a Mexican returning to mother’s Parisian apartment after the death of his father.
Having sent up the zombie flick on Shaun Of The Dead comic duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have trained their sights on the cop movie with their new feature, Hot Fuzz.
Bearing far more resemblance to the languid rhythms of Iranian cinema than Head On or other recent emanations from the Turkish new wave, Climates charts the slow, painful dissolution of a marriage.
By now, sensible seasoned cinema goers will have stopped expecting the always tolerable antics of the Christopher Guest players to replicate the brilliance of This Is Spinal Tap.
From revisionist war dramas, to wrenching documentaries to a musical starring that ginger bloke out of The Frames, the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival has something for everyone. Yes, even for you.
ven before they take the stage Cold War Kids and Elvis Perkins have insured the joint will hop and then some. Nothing, however, could adequately prepare one for the maniacal surge when Brooklyn’s finest appear.
Occupying the same quasi-fictionalised pop history universe as the criminally underrated Grace Of My Heart, Dreamgirls is the story of Diana Ross and The Supremes with some important fantastical differences.
In a candid interview, Sylvester Stallone talks about his lost years and explains why he’s happy that America’s Christian right has embraced the new Rocky movie as a ‘spiritual’ film.
This Brooklyn-based, Minneapolis-reared quartet, currently the most raved about band in America, are no spring chickens and my goodness, doesn’t it show.
Stop the presses. Ed Zwick, director of such dreary though lavish efforts as Glory and The Last Samurai, has made a reasonably exciting film. No, really. At its best, there are shades of the shackled escapee movie about Blood Diamond.
“How many people does it take to kill one man?” begs the tagline in a desperate attempt to make Smokin’ Aces seem much more focused and cogent than it actually is
The brutal regime of Idi Amin is the subject of Kevin Macdonald‘s The Last King Of Scotland. Here the director explains why, to capture the real Africa, he insisted on shooting on location in Uganda.
Rewriting history as a kinky Mata Hari penny-dreadful, Black Book is a lively spy caper that might well have been conceived by Benny Hill and played out in fast motion to the strains of the William Tell overture.
This pleasing supernatural thriller sees Sarah Michelle Gellar play a trucking firm sales-rep lured back to her native Texas by the promise of a big sale.
Mexican maestro Alejandro González Iñárritu hasn’t wasted any time capitalising on the critical and commercial success of Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Babel, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, is being hailed as another masterpiece.
There’s nothing worse than staggering out of the traps when the winner has already been declared, and Douglas McGrath’s Truman Capote biopic, arriving after last year’s highly regarded, Oscar-winning film, has something of the bridesmaid about it.
If you hate all the other Rocky films, humanity in general, cream-coloured ponies and crisp apple strudle, chances are, you may still find a special place in your heart for Sylvester Stallone’s sixth outing as the loveable Philadelphia lummox.
Based on a true story, The Pursuit Of Happyness is far less saccharine than we had any right to expect from a movie starring “Will Smith and his real life son.”
He may have two Oscars, two Golden Globes and a string of hit movies to his name, but Denzel Washington remains as down to earth as it’s possible for a member of Hollywood royalty to be.
In which, after a year spent in the Savoy, our film editor declares her craw full to the brim with CGI animals, gloomy rom-coms and Celtic Tiger thrillers. But there were more than a few pearls in the pig-trough too.
Its Western wing may have gone to pot (and Crystal), but hip-hop’s original agit-prop spirit is alive and thriving in the Eastern Bloc, as evidenced by Polish crew WWO.
There’s a touch of the criminally underrated Unbreakable about this splendid indie debut from first time writer-directors Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore.
Like the sinisterly puritanical Exorcism Of Emily Rose, Requiem takes inspiration from the case of Anneliese Michel, a young German student who, following a series of exorcisms, died in 1976.
Another animated feature? But haven’t I seen 765,664 of these this year already? But wait. This one is from Aardman Studios so, in common with debilitating bone disease, it has to be better than Barnyard, right?
And in the end times, when the Tower of Babel has crumbled into dust, the empire of empires shall grow fat with things sacrificed unto idols. And as they survey the vast expanse at their command they will say unto each other – “ruling sucks – let us go and inflict brain damage on each other by falling off skateboards and bouncing into ceiling fans.”
Yes, I know what you’re thinking – I’m not sitting through a Tibetan film about a rag-tag gang of volunteers protecting antelope from poachers. But Chuan Lu’s Mountain Patrol is, as issue dramas go, rather more thrilling than, say, a Green Cross Code commercial.
In common with many Makhmalbaf efforts, Stray Dogs, a harrowing vignette from Afghanistan, documents social inequality through the plight of forgotten children.
Returning for a second big screen helping of stunt show Jackass, Johnny Knoxville lovingly recalls the time he was strapped to a rocket –and nearly died.
Fantastic, sadistic and sublime, Pan’s Labyrinth, the director’s latest work, is a coruscating fairy-tale breeding horror, politics and unblemished innocence to produce the hands-down, honest-to-God, best movie of 2006.
M. Dercourt’s chilly, relatively bloodless revenge fantasy, selected for Un Certain Regard at Cannes this year, forms an elegant, focused drama with an important moral – never mess with a kid in the middle of her piano recital.
Sex And The City star Kim Cattrall is back on our screens in John Boorman’s The Tiger’s Tail, a dark satirical comedy planets away from her role as the kit-shedding Samantha.
Adapted by Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan from Christopher Priest’s novel about two competing magicians in turn-of-the-20th-century London, The Prestige charts the fortunes of suave Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and working-class runt Alfred Borden (Christian Bale).
Absurd, grotesque and hilarious, those of a sensitive disposition may well find fault with Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, to give it its full glorious title.
No, The Strokes aren’t splitting up, insists guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. Still, he’s enjoying a rare taste of artistic freedom with his debut solo album.
British director Bernard Rose hit paydirt over decade ago with Candyman, but his uncompromising single-mindedness has made him a virtual Hollywood pariah. However, Snuff Movie looks like putting him back in the game.
There are certain rules that govern the modern J-horror, particularly those spawned within The Ring and Grudge franchises. Sure enough, you can check long black hair, dark water, mirrors, sinister children and things that go bump in the shower off the list with Takashi Shimizu’s sequel to his 2004 American remake.
Jonathan Demme’s film of a Neil Young concert is just that. There is no flashy camera work or pyrotechnics on offer. This is an unadorned concert film of a type rarely glimpsed since the 70s. Have Neil and his buddies got the chops to pull it off? You bet your arse they have.
Scissor Sisters are back, and this time they’re on a mission to channel Elton John, Paul McCartney and the Bee Gees into the first soft rock masterpiece of the 21st Century. In an exclusive interview, the group’s main songwriter, Babydaddy, gives us the lowdown on their second coming.
Cast as fictional conjoined twins who start their own punk band Harry and Luke Treadaway have delivered one of the year’s funniest and most moving performances in the mocumentary Brothers Of The Head.
How to make a campus comedy by Steve Pink. Must have a crusty old Dean. Must also have snooty boys who do the bidding of said crusty old Dean. Now we need a cheeky young pup (step forward Mr Long, you’ll do nicely) fighting the system in some way. He will head up the rowdy party house, or in this case a fictitious rival college. They are the good guys.
Just when you think it’s all over bar the lifetime achievement awards (“Congratulations on your continuing existence, old timer”), Martin Scorsese comes along and shoves your face in a grapefruit. The director’s keenly anticipated remake of Infernal Affairs trades post-colonial frisson for dirty Irish gangsters in Boston to splendid effect.
Located somewhere at the nexus between horror and science fiction, Isolation imaginatively transplants the squelching grand guignol of Alien onto a desolate Hibernian landscape.
Before head-butt infamy finished off his career, the world’s greatest living midfielder served as an unlikely muse to the documentary maker Philippe Parreno. Ahead of the film’s Irish premier, the director talks about the making of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.
Nothing could prepare one for the shimmering beacon of awfulness that is Trust The Man. As useless as a volleyball court in a hospital for landmine victims, to gaze on it’s ineptitude is an act of masochism far greater than anything visited upon Wanda von Sacher-Masoch.
Nerd godhead Kevin Smith has gone back to the motherlode with his new movie, Clerks II. Middle age has done little to dent his infatuation with potty humour, he tells Tara Brady.
Re-telling the story of September 11 with a measured hand and lightness of touch hithertoo unhinted at, director Oliver Stone proves a more serious thinker than his paranoia-soaked canon would suggest. Here, he explains how his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam framed his outlook on life and art.
Davis Guggenheim’s excellent, clear-headed documentary, fronted by former almost-President Gore, is a compelling, scary-ass piece of cinema detailing how close we are to planetary heat death. That, of course, is enough to get the cranks out.
As the summer blockbuster season ends, the average cinephile can look forward to a trickle of left field treasures. Echo Park L.A. is one such worthy specimen.
Roll up, roll up for Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe’s discombobulating, goshbustified sockdolager of a fourth album, the most cockamamie carnival to ever hit these here parts all the way from Brixton, England.
Talladega Nights – The Legend Of Ricky Bobby starts as it means to go on – with a quote dubiously attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt – “America is all about speed. Hot, nasty badass speed.”
Though Pavee Lackeen’s thorough depiction of the disenfranchised included Ireland’s new ethnic minorities around the fringes, David Gleeson’s follow-up to Cowboys And Angels is the first indigenous feature to take the immigrant experience as its central theme.
The plight of Ireland’s migrant community is explored in the new heist flick The Front Line. The movie’s stars Eriq Ebouaney and Fatou N’diaye explain why the Irish need to be more open to newcomers.
For those past the first flush of youth, the sophomore offering from Amusement Parks On Fire can beg but one question - what’s wrong with youngsters today? Rock may be a young man or woman’s game, but Nottingham’s Michael Feerick is surely pushing the point to extremes.
Sexually outrageous on stage, potty-mouthed Canuck Peaches turns out to be rather a sweet-heart in person. And for the record: no, she’d rather you didn’t stick your hand up her crotch.
Over the course of THE LETTING GO (recorded in Iceland last winter with Björk producer Valgeir Sigurdsson) one stumbles hither and thither on a characteristically savage poeticism.
Some might say that LITTLE MAN the latest beast unleashed from the Wayans stable, is their most disgracefully no-brow ‘effort’ to date. The film is already languishing in IMDB’s worst movies of all time and has appalled critics the world over.
Anointed by the blogosphere, Tapes ‘N Tapes are just about the hottest thing in indie rock right now. Despite his rather fraught stage persona, frontman Josh Grier turns out to be a picture of charm. And no, he can’t explain the slightly silly name either.
Utilising the same phantasmagoric computer-rotoscoped animation he once employed for Waking Life, Richard Linklater has achieved something any sane, rational person would have thought impossible – he’s made a coherent film from Philip K. Dick’s labyrinthine A Scanner Darkly.
Maggie Gyllenhaal has ridden out controversy and kept her private life to herself while carving out an impeccably cool career in Hollywood. No wonder all the girls fancy her.
Using the same chorus structure made popular by Short Cuts and Crash, this singular Australian drama refuses to connect all the dots until the very last moments.
Dabbling in the same muddied waters as Fight Club, but to much greater effect, David Ayers’ directorial debut (following his testosterone-drenched screenplays for Training Day and Dark Blue) takes us down, down, down into the most disturbing aspects of masculinity and American life.
A Tinsel Town director of the old school, Michael Mann goes back to his ‘80s roots in his new movie, Miami Vice. In a forthright interview he talks about working with Colin Farrell, why he insisted on shooting in Paraguay and explains he’s not as tough as Hollywood gossip would have you believe.
We can’t truly know if Bettie was a total naïf at the time or if her Filth For Jesus campaign was spectacular doublethink, but happily, the real Bettie Page, now 82, has no problems with the duality of Harron’s portrait. She isn’t, however, all that keen on the word ‘notorious’ appearing in the title. Good for her.
When he’s not playing the evil criminal mastermind in Hollywood blockbusters, Eddie Izzard can be found wandering the corridors of the European Parliament with Tony Blair. Tara Brady gets a yes, no and maybe from the nail polish-loving English comedian.
It seems altogether churlish to criticise Pixar for producing a movie that isn’t quite as good as Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, but with Cars, you just can’t help it.
It ought to have been perfect. Everygirl meets Everyfratboy, their collective likeability bolstered by an off-screen romance and sympathy garnered from the Brangelina fallout. Finally, we thought, Jen’s found a vehicle to properly showboat with her finely attuned comic skills. She and Vaughn tear strips off each other while Jon Favreau quips like it’s 1996. Go Vaughniston! Can’t fail, right?
Pixar founder John Lasseter has revolutionised children's films over the past decade. Now the Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo creator has done it again with Cars.
As far as this writer is concerned, Category III films – Hong Kong’s answer to the good old-fashioned X rating – are where it’s at. Johnny To’s triad thriller, the first film to receive the dread stamp in quite some time, isn’t the crimson tide we might have expected, nor indeed does it stylishly swagger into theatres like the director’s girl gang epic The Heroic Trio.
Little Fish, as you may determine from the credits list, is an actor’s project. That is, a small, independently financed Australian film boasting the sort of meaty roles actors will travel half way around the planet for. Two words. Addiction Drama. Thus, Cate Blanchett, Sam Neill and Hugo Weaving, all people who can work pretty much anywhere and any time they please, have returned to the continent that formed them to deliver Raw Emotional Performances.
Intended as the first of six films set around the outskirts of Bucharest – no wait, come back – Cristi Puiu’s grimly humorous film, winner of Un Certain Regard at Cannes last year, puts Death right back in the movies where it belongs.
Is it sexual liberation in handy CD form? Well, we can’t know for sure, but listening to Peaches, one can momentarily forget that we live on the same planet as the faux girl power of the Pussycat Dolls.
Superman Returns presents all the iconic standards against a setting that is both contemporary and impossible to place. Remarkably, Singer creates enough spectacle around this familiar mythology to make it seem fresh and cool again.
As animals-in-jeopardy movies go, Over The Hedge is significantly more entertaining than either Madagascar or The Wild, boasting a smart, stinging screenplay, despite a finger-wagging moral about junk food.
With Walmart; The High Cost Of Low Price, veteran filmmaker Robert Greenwald has issued a savage critique of the biggest private corporation in the world, one which has strip-mined the blue collar landscape of America and beyond.
Though fascinating at the level of performance and subtext, it occasionally feels like we’re not watching a proper film at all, but for all the overbearing pretensions, Heading South boasts a nifty rendition of seething alpha female sexual jealousy.
He may not be your average indie kids dream ticket, but Brian Kennedy has lived in very interesting times. An initially promising career was scuppered by record company machinations, but, under the stewardship of Van Morrison, he matured into a remarkably successful solo artist, as well as a respected novelist. Then there were the small matters of performing at George Best's funeral, the recent Eurovision controversy - and his current run at the helm of RTE's flagship summer Saturday night entertainment show.
Still, there’s a neat efficiency about Reeker that clammily grasps your attention. It’s no Sistine Chapel, but if you stand back far enough, you can admire the gleaming nuts and bolts.
As well as being a rising actress and Playboy cover girl, Dumplings starlet Bai Ling has at least eight spirits currently inhabiting her body, one of whom is so shy it insists she has sex with the lights off. Alrighty then.
Slavishly adhering to every fluffy Brit rom-com cliché, the shrill mother, the precocious kid sister and the slutty best man are all present and correct.
To be fair, director Justin Lin does a mean car-chase and makes terrific use of gaudy J-pop. Sadly, whenever the film slows down to include frivolities like dialogue, things are neither fast nor furious, but duller than a factory car manual.
Lessons from history can only be a good thing and Loach’s fine-looking Palme D’Or winner works hard to include every possible perspective on the War Of Independence.
Their debut album Hopes And Fears launched a host of hit singles, going on to become one of the most successful British records of the past five years. But, their indie background notwithstanding, Keane have still been dismissed by some self-styled aficionados as just too nice to be considered real rock'n'rollers. "If only people knew," says lead singer Tom Chaplin.
Essentially a two-hander, Hard Candy rehearses all manner of arguments pertaining to paedophilia and vigilante justice through two brilliantly sharp, menacing performances from Ms. Page and Patrick Wilson.
When The Wind That Shakes The Barley, Ken Loach’s dramatisation of the Irish War of Independence, won the Palme D’Or at Cannes last month, it triggered a vociferously hostile response from right wing British pundits, who branded the director as a terrorist-sympathising Commie. Few of them, however, had actually seen the film.
29-year-old director Jason Reitman might be the scion of Hollywood royalty, but the success of his satirical skit on the tobacco lobby, Thank You For Smoking, is all his own work.
Equally commendable to Offside's dealing with social injustice is the film’s ability to communicate the sheer, simple joy and strange comedy associated with supporting a football team.
Schooled in proper rock star etiquette, Primal Scream behave precisely as gentlemen drawn to their profession ought to with a big young-dumb-and-full-of-cum sound to match.
Those who harbour romantic notions about starving artists clattering away of their typewriters in appalling social circumstance will be very pleased indeed by Ask The Dust.
Even devout horror nuts had little cause to feel perturbed by the prospect of a remake of The Omen. I mean, who cares if it was thrown together to capitalise on a date (6/6/06)? It’s not like we’re dealing with a classic.
Life has been a bit of a rollercoaster for Ronan Keating since he left Boyzone for a solo career. But he’s not one for moaning or dishing dirt – even when conversation turns to Louis Walsh.
How do they manage it? Few acts have thrived doing exactly the same electroclash thing over two decades and nine studio albums, but the Pet Shop Boys seem totally exempt from the gravitation laws that govern chart success.
Having scored an arthouse goal with Pot Luck, director Cédric Klapish has reunited the same incredibly annoying characters for this equally sophomoric sequel.
They’re barely out of high school and have strong opinions on daytime TV and R. Kelly’s dwarf fascination. So, no, The Spinto Band aren’t your average run of the mill indie-rock outfit,
Now here’s something you don’t happen upon everyday. Rian Johnson’s sui generis debut feature, a high school noir of all things, took a Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at Sundance. All told, the writer-director spent six years getting Brick into a cinema near you, and no wonder. Potential investors must have thought him quite mad.
Pop quiz, hot shots. You’re a diminutive supernova pushing on in years (say 43) who has recently been voted the Most Irritating Movie Star of all time. There’s been some unpleasant publicity of late, concerning your wacko religious cult and increasingly barmy behaviour. Not one, but two directors have left you in the lurch with your great, big fuck-off film franchise. What do you do? What do you do?
This smart Brit-com fashioned in the same cheeky spirit as Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries, is neither a chick-flick nor anything to do with Richard Curtis.
Tracing Daniel’s transformation from eccentric outsider teen to prolific lo-fi popsmith and acclaimed visual artist, The Devil And Daniel Johnson frames a bizarre backstory in the wider context of bipolarity and creativity.
Having re-invented television drama with Lost and Alias J.J. Abrams now turns his attention to the Mission Impossible franchise. But what’s all about this about him saving Star Trek?
Like Michael Winterbottom, Ozon’s prolific output and promiscuous style can be his undoing. Many titles, most recently 5X2, seem more like doodles than proper films. This is particularly true of Time To Leave (Le Temps Qui Reste), a gay dying young soap.
Mark Dornford-May’s vibrant reworking of Bizet’s opera, transplanted from the South African stage, may not sound like sangria in the park, but even devout philistines are sure to be swayed.
In July of 2003, Doug Bruce, a perfectly normal young Englishman, took the New York subway only to wind up in Coney Island the following day, with no recollection of who he was. Bruce’s severe retrograde amnesia – a case surely destined for the pages of an Oliver Sachs tome - is explored in this documentary by friend and filmmaker, Rupert Murray.
Young Zac’s dad thinks his son is gay. So does everyone else, including Zac. But will they all come to terms with it? Jean-Marc Vallée’s cute Québécois coming-of-age tale has already taken the audience award at Toronto and was the official Canadian entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.
For Gen X-ers like Kurt Cobain, Matt Groening and Sonic Youth, Daniel Johnston is akin to Syd or Roky, a gifted figure beset by the demons of delusional paranoia and manic depression. A 1994 tribute album featuring Beck, Tom Waits and eels showcased his ghostly and surrealistic folk songs, and now, as the remarkable documentary film The Devil And Daniel Johnston goes on release, hotpress is granted an audience with the man who isn’t there.
She’s worked with film makers as diverse as Alan Parker and Quentin Tarantino. For her latest role Bronagh Gallagher found herself in a Middle Ages love triangle. No wonder she kept breaking out in giggles.
What a piece of work is Rent. How ill-conceived in form. How displeasing to the eye. How stupidly far up it’s own arse. Happily, I have never suffered through the hit Broadway musical of the same name. Unless I am kidnapped and nailed into a seat with my eyeballs duct-taped open, that is unlikely to change now.
As a rule, it’s good to be wary of the autobiographical purge. Wonder then at Noah Baumbach’s exhilarating fourth feature, The Squid And The Whale, an intensely personal satire inspired by his parent’s 1990 divorce and early contender for Best Film of 2006.
To borrow a line from the great Leonard Nimoy, this account of an alien encounter is true. And by true, we mean false. It’s all lies, but they’re entertaining lies, and in the end, isn’t that the real truth?
Canadian director John Fawcett last dropped by with Ginger Snaps, a pleasing rush of lycanthropy, menstruation and goth angst in suburbia. Excluding the Nicole Kidman bits from Moulin Rouge, it was the best horror show of 2000. His delayed sophomore venture lacks the chic indie innovation of that earlier film, but it’s an intriguing knot of Celtic mythology, girl-ghosts and killer sheep just the same.
What a piece of work is Rent. How ill-conceived in form. How displeasing to the eye. How stupidly far up it’s own arse. Happily, I have never suffered through the hit Broadway musical of the same name.
Junebug opens with footage of the hollering mountain men of North Carolina – a fitting folk art overture for Phil Morrison’s eccentric, gently comical and down home debut.
She’s acted in big screen Joyce adaptations and appeared in hip-hop cinema. Now Irish actress Fionnula Flanagan is set to enter the major league, following her turn in the acclaimed – and Oscar nominated – Transamerica.
Despite Roth’s audacious use of squelching gristle and raw tendons, Hostel pivots around an old-fashioned standard within the genre – if you fuck, you will die. Or, more accurately in this case, if you backpack into Slovakia chasing easy eastern bloc girls, you will find yourself at the mercy of a sinister snuff ring.
Whip-smart, arresting and far more fleet-footed than a two-hour plus running time ought to allow, The Inside Man is a storming heist movie from Spike Lee, perhaps not the first name one expects to find on a lavishly budgeted action thriller.
Their reputation for seriousness precedes them. But in the flesh, Daniel Day-Lewis and Rebecca Miller could very nearly pass for an everyday couple. Photos by Graham Keogh.
The last decent studio romantic comedy came, to the best of my recollection, from the pen of Nora Ephron at a time when the zoetrope reigned and moving pictures were thought the work of the devil. Weird then, that this unlovely genre proliferates while we wait entire decades for a western to trot along.
If you’ve been aching for a twee diddle-de-di confection set in the depressingly prehistoric Ireland of the '60s, then The Boys And Girl From County Clare is guaranteed to float your boat like no flick since Waking Ned.
Spike Lee is a firebrand film-maker and not one to mince his words. So what is the spiritual father of African-American cinema doing making an old fashioned heist flick?
Though perfectly pleasant and diverting, were it not for Ms. Huffman or Fionnula Flanagan’s stupendously gauche turn as Bree’s disapproving harpy mother, you’d be forgiven for not remembering a thing about Transamerica five minutes after the final credits.
He directed a young Tom Cruise in Cocktail and inadvertently unleashed 'Don't Worry, Be Happy' on an unsuspecting world. For his latest project director Roger Donaldson returns to his roots in the antipodes words.
Talky, sparky and definitely profane, Studs is an Irish soccer film and underdog to root for. Set against the decadently muddy backdrop of Sunday league football, Paul Mercier’s comedy-drama (adapted from his own play) traces the suddenly changing fortunes of incompetent fictional amateurs Emmet Rovers.
Jack Johnson may be a regular dude, but with his latest album simultaneously at No.1 in the UK and the US he is one with a vast world-wide fanbase. So how did this happy-go-lucky surfer suddenly become a hero to millions?
If you’re the sort of person who enjoys reading about Alex Higgins playing ten quid snooker games in the hostel where he currently resides then y ou may well get a kick from watching Mr. Pacino hoo-ha-ing his way through the woeful Two For The Money.
Adapted from Alan Moore’s graphic novel by the brothers Wachowski, V For Vendetta is a heavily flawed affair. That said, this is fascinating, challenging cinema.
From obscure Australian character actor to fan-boy pin-up, it has been a long, strange trip for Hugo Weaving. His latest turn, as a masked anti-hero, could be his definitive role.
This is Murder Ballads made celluloid – epic, edgy and contemptuous of the standards imposed by convention. It’s also an endlessly fascinating, morally complex proper Western despite the potential for Skippy sightings.
Though largely pointless, recent remakes of Dawn Of The Dead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre haven’t been nearly as disgraceful as we might have hoped and The Hills Have Eyes is infinitely superior to either.
Unsurprisingly, we’re straight into dramatics with Ms. Goldfrapp delivering Kate Bush proportioned vocals over Connery Bond themes that never got made.
Acclaimed by the Academy, Gavin Hood's film Tsotsi introduces audiences to a hoodlum's slow, but captivating, rehabilitation, along with the big no no's of childcare.
Show Your Bones sees the crew catch their breath in the less chaotic mid-tempo pop lane. Happily, we may now discover what Nick Zinner’s ornate guitar work actually sounds like when not condensed into the over-excited, if enjoyable twenty second spurts that characterised the first record.
You think you have a basic understanding of someone, and then Hollywood goes and makes an incredible movie about them and puts your knowledge to shame. That's just what audiences experience with Director Bennet Miller's eye-opening Capote.
She came to our attention with a disturbingly convincing turn as a bondage queen. Now Emma De Caunes joins an ensemble cast for a whimsical deconstruction of the Hollywood musical.
Nicolas Cage's newest role as a downhearted and disillusioned TV forecaster fails to receive pity from his family, job, and even sadder, film audiences.
When is a horror movie not a horror movie? The Fog demonstrates how so-called scary flicks can so easily fall short of meeting basic genre requirements.
Co-written and directed by Dave McKean, Gaiman’s regular inker, with creature effects provided by the Henson Creature Workshop, the film momentarily recalls any number of spectacular rites-of-passage fantasies – The Wizard Of Oz, Labyrinth and Spirited Away all come to mind – while not being quite like anything you’ve ever seen before.
Though it hardly constitutes breaking news, the South Korean new wave continues to dazzle, invent and mind-fuck. Lady Vengeance, a dizzying baroque and the capstone to Chan-wook Park’s spectacular revenge trilogy keeps up the good work.
Like many of the studio greats, Disney’s first computer animated feature finds inspiration in a tale familiar to anyone who made it through kindergarten. This time around, however, the titular avian doomsayer has rather more guile than the featherbrain who walked right into Foxy Loxy’s supper-pot.
California-born, Harvard-educated, Alison Brown is not your everyday bluegrass flagbearer. But her emotive playing – and the contribution of her Compass Records label – have made her a leading figure in the American roots scene.
The enfant-terrible of Korean cinema, Chan-wook Park, is back with perhaps his most challenging and surreal feature to date. Yest, amidst the gore and torture, he says, lies a serious moral message.
Recycling a plot already familiar to fans of The Pacifier and Mr. Nanny, BMH2 – for thus we shall call it – cobbles together some rubbishy story lines involving the FBI and a need for family bonding and super-hackers and defence systems.
Timothy Treadwell was an amateur conservationist whose obsession with grizzly bears would lead to his grisly (sorry) demise in 2005. Apparently suffering from at least three kinds of mad, Treadwell would spend 13 summers in a remote Alaskan park attempting to live among the bears before the creatures he repeatedly made kissy faces at would attack and devour both him and his unfortunate girlfriend.
Raised on the road by evangelical hippies, Joaquin Phoenix has overcome the tragic death of his brother, River, to become one of Hollywood’s most brooding leading men.
Condemned by Palestinian groups as a malicious work of Zionist propaganda; damned by Jewish organisations for being ‘soft on terrorism’, this well intentioned and Spielbergised account of the Arab-Israeli conflict has something to offend everyone.
It’s a no-brainer, right? Everygirl’s favourite everygirl, Jennifer Aniston, returns to Pasadena with her dishy lawyer fiancé (Ruffalo) for her sister’s wedding. There, she stumbles upon a sordid piece of family history – that her late mom and wearingly irrepressible grandma (Shirley MacLaine) inspired the book and film of The Graduate. Intrigued, Jen sets off to find the ‘Benjamin Braddock’ of the piece and determine her real paternity.
Hidden (Caché) compresses all Herr Haneke’s pet preoccupations – voyeurism, colonialism, bourgeois complacency, weasels under cocktail cabinets – into his most effectively disquieting thriller since Funny Games.
During his misspent youth, Johnny Cash crashed and burned so spectacularly, so frequently, that a future rock biopic became something of a certainty. James Mangold’s fine film has plenty of seamy detail – Cash’s amphetamine fuelled tours with Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, hysterical groupies, a drug-bust at the Mexican border. Primarily though, Walk The Line is a romance, a dark, spiritual, difficult, redemptive love story.
Terrence Malick (Badlands, Days Of Heaven), one of cinema’s most unique creatures, doesn’t do car-chases. The New World, his reworking of the Pocahontas legend, is less a film, more a sublime visual poem, with the colonisation of America re-envisaged as the expulsion from Eden.
How cool are Clap Your Hands Say Yeah? Well, cool enough to shift forty thousand units from cardboard boxes before anyone had heard of them. Ice cold enough to make the universally knee-trembling reviews this album received stateside seem far too understated. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, Alec Ounsworth’s Brooklyn five piece has it all going on.
A surreal journey into the inner life of an Irish transvestite in ‘70s London is the basis of Breakfast On Pluto, the latest cinematic collaboration from writer Pat McCabe and director Neil Jordan.
Even before the opening credit sequence, the zaniness of the presumptuously entitled Fun With Dick And Jane has become truly wearisome. And it’s all downhill from there.
Neil Jordan and novelist Pat McCabe reunite for the incongruously lipsticked odyssey of Patrick ‘Kitten’ Braden (Cillian Murphy, impressive and impossibly pretty), a border town transvestite Pollyanna stuck in the oppressive sepia of the grubby '70s.
He brought the plight of the Guildford Four to the silver screen and shot a weepy film about the Irish diaspora. Now Jim Sheridan has made a movie with the sultan of bling, rap star 50 Cent. It’s all Bono’s fault, he tells Tara Brady.
From Anthony Swofford’s Gulf War I memoir, director Sam Mendes has purposely fashioned a film that closely replicates the experience of being stuck in an eternal stationary queue. Jarhead is a war movie with no combat whatsoever and no real war to speak of.
