review
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by Oscar O’Sullivan Who else here saw Challengers earlier this year and had their minds blown? The trio of stunning performances, the perfectly paced non-linear story, the pounding electronic score, precise camera and rhythmic editing – it’s one of the year’s very best, yet it seems to have fallen by the wayside in the awards…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan For the first third or so of Sean Baker’s film Anora, we are invited to live vicariously in a world free of worries or consequences, the playground of the young, the beautiful, and the obscenely rich. Anora (Mikey Madison) has hit the jackpot by catching the eye of Ivan ‘Vanya’ Zacharov (Mark…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan WARNING – this review will get into some major spoilers for Gladiator II. I normally prefer not to do this with newly-released films, but a lot of what I want to dig into would be impossible to discuss without getting into the final act. Personally speaking, I don’t think the film offers…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan Film Festival hype can be a double-edged sword for a new film. On the one hand, rave reviews from the world’s top critics are going to come in handy for the eventual marketing campaign, as well as getting a head start on word-of-mouth. On the other hand, the film may be set…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan Look, you can make a movie where nothing happens – as long as there’s a good reason for nothing happening. The Damned is simply not the kind of film where nothing should be happening. Picture this – an Icelandic fishing outpost, utterly isolated in the dead of winter, ignores a foreign ship…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan Bring Them Down The first of two new releases I watched in the Everyman last night, and certainly the better of the two. Bring Them Down is a rural Irish revenge parable that hits some dynamic highs but stumbles over a heavy-handed and half-hearted moral message. Michael (Christopher Abbot) is a tense,…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan Where do we draw the line when it comes to that rare and elusive genre of ‘Magical Realism’? Is there some defined point that should never be crossed, lest the film topple over into pure fantasy? Is the realism the more vital ingredient? How those elements are weighted surely comes down to…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan Ah, the post-Oscar film. When you’ve reached the very peak of your craft, where is there left to go? Down, inevitably, though often through no fault of the actors who have starred in disappointing post-Oscar films. After all, the lengthy production cycle of a feature film often means these follow-ups were usually…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan As a kid growing up in the 2000s, watching a movie was a very different experience than it is today. Streaming was barely an idea yet, my TV options were Dora and Blues Clues, and the cinema trips were a relative rarity. DVDs were where it was at, a big silver box…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan The town of Horizon is burning. We’ve watched for minutes now as Native Americans descend upon the settlers and mow them down, setting every structure aflame and battering down the barricades of the last survivors. It’s brutally violent without being graphic, lighting and tasteful angles concealing gore without blunting the impacts. Families…
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