GAY AND LESBIAN FILM FESTIVALThe hot new Dublin-born, New-York-based director Jimmy Smallhorn, Desert Hearts and ER director Donna Deitch, and zany NY comedienne Reno will all be on hand to introduce their films at the 6th Dublin Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, which runs at the IFC in Dubin from July 30th to August 3rd.
Thought that’d grab your attention! Having made his name with such arthouse classics as In The Mood For Love, Fallen Angels and Chungking Express, legendary Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai is back with the eagerly anticipated 2046. A dazzling collage of existential longing, wacky sci-fi and lurid pulp thrills, it confirms his status as, well, one of the real greats of modern cinema.
This year’s Cannes Film Festival is set to be the most successful yet for the Irish film-making community, according to film board chief executive Mark Woods.
Having knocked ’em dead in America, the Oscar-nominated MONSTERS INC is ready to repeat its success here.
CRAIG FITZSIMONS meets the film’s director, PETE DOCTER
This Is My Father is a new Irish film which manages to be commercial but not patronisingly Irish. CRAIG FITZSIMONS spoke to one of the stars, PAT SHORTT.
Australian director Philip Noyce has directed such Hollywood blockbusters as Patriot Games and The Bone Collector yet his latest offering Rabbit Proof Fence is an altogether more considered offering. Tara Brady asks if this latest work and the forthcoming The Quiet American signifies a change in his approach to film-making?
Once director John Carney has picked up yet another gong at the British Film Awards, while Armagh cinematographer Seamus McGarvey was honoured for his work on Atonement.
As one glance at her CV shows, Barbara Hammer is not your run-of-the-mill avant garde, militantly anti-establishment lesbian film-maker. Tara Brady spoke to the acclaimed documentarist and harvard fellow ahead of her upcoming appearance at the 12th Dublin Lesbian & Gay film festival.
Welsh actor Rhys Ifans is best known for his role as the easy-going slacker Spike in Notting Hill, but in reality he's a driven actor who's more concerned about imminent war than the state of the British film industry. But he still enjoys a pint, and yes, he did sing with the Super Furry Animals
'Dambé, The Mali Project' – a documentary featuring Irish musicians Liam O Maonlai and Paddy Keenan – has been added to the bill for this year's Jameson Dublin Film Festival.
Irish film-maker LEO REGAN recently won a BAFTA for a documentary about right-wing skinheads and barely a week later saw his latest project, a raw portrait of a friend’s drug addiction, screened by Channel 4. LIAM MACKEY reports
Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting Hill man Richard Curtis is back with another film that has heartstrings and funnybones in its sights. But is Love Actually any good? Craig Fitzsimons and Tara Brady endeavour to find out
That's Brendan and Trudy, by the way, not RODDY DOYLE and KIERON J. WALSH, writer and director respectively of the new hit Irish film comedy. CRAIG FITZSIMONS meets them.
Peter Murphy meets The Plague Monkeys, who have just released their second album, The Sunburn Index. Under discussion: Soundscapes, European film-makers and Alanis Morissette s lyrics.
In Belfast recently for the Film Festival, Albert Maysles talks to Tara Brady about his early days with the Drew Collective and the challenges he faced pioneering fly-on-the-wall documentary making.
Dundalk-born director John Moore has produced one of the most gung-ho portrayals of the US military in recent cinema history in behind enemy lines, yet Craig Fitzsimons discovers a film-maker who finds flag-waving unacceptable
KEN RUSSELL is one of the most
controversial film directors of our time. Now, he s published his first novel. OLAF TYARANSEN met him. Pics: CATHAL DAWSON.
Having scored critical and commercial success – not to mention putting Irish cinema on the map with the likes of My Left Foot and In The Name Of The Father – Jim Sheridan has now mined his own past for in America, a haunting remembrance of the film-maker’s time as a struggling immigrant on the streets of New York.
GEORGE BYRNE joins the stars of stage turned stars of screen at the CORK FILM FESTIVAL as one band's star-crossed story takes another unexpected turn. Snaps: GEORGE BYRNE.
Seven years ago, CATHERINE ZETA-JONES was so down on her luck that she was having to open supermarkets to pay the rent. Then came a move to Hollywood and the patronage of, first, Steven Spielberg and, then, Michael Douglas who was so taken with the Welsh actress' charms that he married her. In London last week for her new film, Traffic, she talked to CRAIG FITZSIMONS about life among the Hollywood A-list
The 6th Mid Ulster Film Festival will take place from May 1–3 in the spectacular Ulster History Park, Omagh, screening over 80 films, with Q&As and fancy dress events.
The Irish star opens up on sex, drugs, racism, crime, acting, actors and actresses, as well as slamming the Irish film industry and RTE.
Text: JOE JACKSON. Portraits: CATHAL DAWSON
BECKETT ON FILM is one of the most ambitious cinematic projects ever. Nineteen of Samuel Beckett's plays have been made into movies, directed by and starring numerous A-list figures. To mark the occasion, JOE JACKSON talks to Bono, John Hurt and Enda Hughes about one of the 20th century's greatest dramatists
A once high-flying solicitor who was jailed for fraud, David Elio Malocco is now a budget film-maker with a strong anti-establishment view, a man who says he has swapped a "disgraceful" materialistic lifestyle for a social conscience. Here, he talks about crime, punishment, Sinn Fein, Shelbourne, God and the movies
While the end of the eponymous film might give the impression that organised crime and hard drugs disappeared from Ireland after the reporter’s death, latest garda figures offer a very different picture. And the harsh reality, many insist, is even worse.
The 14th Dublin Film Festival will be underway by the time you read this, and will remain in full swing till 25th April. Admission to all screenings is restricted to Festival members, but since the membership fee is a mere £3, it's certainly more than worth your while taking the trouble. Here's a brief rundown of ten of the expected highlights.
County Cork’s Kim Carroll has won the Gold Medal at Utah’s Park City Film Music Festival, the first event that singularly recognises the contribution of composers to the motion picture industrY.
The Irishman who founded the legendary Radio Caroline in 1964 is to be immortalised in a new film by Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting Hill writer Richard Curtis.
Sex and sanctity, grit and glitter, penthouse and pavement, God and the Devil, and all conical points in between!
PETER MURPHY dials M for ADONNA, the pre-eminent pop icon of this and every other year
Actor, writer, musician, director, and husband of Angelina Jolie, BILLY BOB THORNTON is currently a very busy man, with one album on release and no less than three movies queueing up at the box-office. All this and he’s constantly on his guard against germs
Though oscar-nominated screenwriter Menno Meyjes has received criticism from some quarters for his portrayal of the young Adolf Hitler in his directorial debut Max, the Dutch-born film-maker insists that the humanity of history’s most notorious tyrant is all too clear. “And that’s what we should be afraid of,” he tells Tara Brady
Film types living in Cork will undoubtedly be flocking to Set For Action – The Cork Film Forum, which will be held on Wedneday August 26th in the Firkin Crane Centre beside Shandon.
Gosh. 2004. We came (almost literally when Quentin T. swaggered back into town), we saw, we felt gooey. An awesome, sweltering, overwhelming time was had by all – well, by movie buffs at any rate. Dead genres arose and appeared to many. Documentaries – long the bridesmaid of cinema history – got their groove back, thanks in part to that Moore fellow’s rants and raves.
RAP BAND Niggers With Attitude, who once sang the song 'Burn Hollywood' would be more than pleased to hear of the success of the Irish Film Centre which came to Dublin's Temple Bar Area a year ago.
Oscar-winning film The Cider House Rules was given a 12 rating in Britain. In this country, only those 18 and over will be permitted to see it. Is its focus on abortion the reason? Report: NIALL STANAGE
Rock With Your Cork Out – a documentary on the Cork rock scene – will be screened at The Pavilion next week, with live appearances from Hope Is Noise (pictured) and more.
Six Semesters could be the first independent Irish feature film with an entire cast and crew made up of students from an Irish university. Jackie Hayden goes behind the casting couch with director John McKeown.
Producer and musician Daniel Lanois talks about turning his latest album into a film, cutting out the middleman to distribute his own music, and why he's fascinated by Michael Jackson's feet.
Playing a character "full of loneliness and happiness" proved something of a challenge for actress Marie Bunel in the Oscar-nominated French film The Chorus. But as she tells Tara Brady, working with director Christopher Barratier helped her discover that acting can be much like using an instrument.
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.
STRIKING THE RIGHT CORD'
Film soundtrack buffs and nattily-attired acid jazz whippersnappers CORDUROY tell peter murphy about their strange
passion for Dave Allen's theme tune.
The violent life and death of the Florida prostitute Aileen Wuornos, who was executed in 2002 for a string of murders, is the subject matter of the debut film feature monster by Patty Jenkins. Craig Fitzsimons talks to the writer-director about the controversial, Oscar-winning movie
CRAIG FITZSIMONS talks to KURT JONES and DAVID KELLY, writer/director and star respectively, of Waking Ned, a gentle comedy set in Ireland, but shot in the Isle of Man. Pics Cathal dawson.
Controversial Welsh filmmaker Marc Evans discusses his new project, violent reality-TV parody My Little Eye, and fondly remembers the mayhem his last one caused
With his first film The Station Agent, Tom McCarthy has fashioned a magnetic fable of Fin, the new-dwarf-in-town, which has invited comparison with Ford and Cassavetes.
Plans for a film based on the life of Republican figurehead and Labour party founder James Connolly have received a boost with SIPTU agreeing to help finance the project.
Mike Leigh’s latest project all or nothing continues his fascination with the everyday mundanity of working-class life, but as usual there is warmth and a genuine humour at the film’s core
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.
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.
If you’re going to follow up a hit like East Is East, best to do it in style – by turning to Blackpool, darts and morris dancing. Damien O’Donnell tells Craig Fitzsimons about his “uncool” new movie
A few years ago it would’ve been impossible to make a movie like goldfish memory, but thanks to digital technology and film board funding director Liz Gill is celebrating a box-office hit.
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.
DANIEL DAY Lewis, John Malkovich and Gerard Depardieu were all considered for the role of the vampire Lestat, in Neil Jordan's forthcoming film version of Anne Rice's complex, erotic horror story Interview With The Vampire.
Nailed is a heist movie with a difference. It’s been written, produced and shot in Belfast. Director Adrian O’Connell believes it could revitalise the north’s film industry.
Having caused a major rumpus with his last film, Behind Enemy Lines, Irish director John Moore has gone the boy’s own adventure route with his remake of The Flight Of The Phoenix. Dennis Quaid, Kevin Costner and “arseholes working in commercials” all come under the microscope as he talks to Tara Brady.
CATHY DILLON chats to Dubliner JIMMY SMALLHORNE, writer and director of 2by4, an acclaimed new film charting the lives of young gay Irish immigrants in New York.
Tara Brady talks to Julie Brocquy, producer of Osama, the acclaimed Afghan film which tells the story of a young girl forced to disguise herself as a boy to survive life under the Taliban regime.
DISCO PIGS stars, CILLIAN MURPHY and ELAINE CASSIDY, tell CRAIG FITZSIMONS about how they were drawn to the intense relationship and Cork patois of Pig and Runt
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
One minute you're directing the UK National Lottery, the next you're fending off rabid dogs in the Himalayas. Asif Kapadia talks about his remarkable cinematic journey
Charlotte Bradley has worked as a successful actress since her early twenties. Now, however, her leading role in About Adam may make her a star.
Interview: Stephen Robinson
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.
"This is very much my love-letter to wine," says trained sommelier and film director Jonathon Nossiter. So why then is his new documentary Mondovino coming under fire from the global wine industry? Because, as he tells Tara Brady, it exposes how the globalisation of the wine industry is destroying thousands of years of heritage.
From Dr Strangelove to Eyes Wide Shut, film director Stanley Kubrick cast an enigmatic shadow over film. Since his death, the director’s widow, Christiane Kubrick, has dedicated herself to preserving his legacy. Here she offers a glimpse of the man behind the legend.
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.
Adam & Paul is not your everyday heroin-is-evil social tract masquerading as entertainment. as screenwriter and co-star Mark O’Halloran attests, it’s halfway between Laurel & Hardy and Mike Leigh. Photography Liam Sweeney
Currently drawing huge crowds to The Olympia with his third Mrs. Brown play, Brendan O’Carroll nonetheless has a bone to pick with those pushing for the retention of the section 481 tax break for film-makers.
Tara Brady talks to Catalina Sandino Moreno, star of Maria Full Of Grace, the gritty Colombian drama which tells the story of a seventeen year-old girl attempting to escape the dead-end environs of backstreet Bogota.
Craig Fitzsimons talks to David Gleeson, director of Cowboys & Angels, another exciting addition to the growning canon of unapologetically youthful and exuberent contemporary Irish movies
Daniel Lapaine and Alice Evans are the stars of The Abduction Club, a restoration romantic comedy set in Ireland. "It's like Jane Austen after having a good shag," insists Daniel
If I Should Fall From Grace is the most intimate portrait of SHANE MacGOWAN yet. CRAIG FITZSIMONS meets the director of the critically acclaimed biopic, SARAH SHARE.
It s a bit of a mouthful but it s actually the multi-talented Parisian musician, photographer, sometime pop producer and film maker Jay Alanski in an ongoing process of aural and spiritual development.
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.
He debuted in East is East, became a household face in Eastenders and has finally gone west to star in the bollywood meets hollywood movie, The Guru. The son of an Indian father and Irish mother, he talks here about his thrash metal past, the difficulties of being an Asian actor and why Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson are his spiritual gurus.
Catherine Hardwicke won the Sundance best director award for Thirteen, her controversial and unflinching depiction of teen queen sex, drugs, shoplifting and self-harming. Moviehouse meets the director and co-star Holly Hunter.
Once renowned as the doyen of new queer cinema, Far From Heaven director Todd Haynes has long since infiltrated the Hollywood mainstream. In a wide-ranging interview, he speaks about updating Douglas Sirk, seeing Pulp in Dublin and the parallels between American society today and in the 1950s.
On the occasion of the first Irish screening of Nagisa Oshima’s Ai No Corrida (In The Realm Of The senses), banned for 18 years because of its explicit sex scenes involving lead actor Tatsuya Fujii’s hardcore hard-on’s, Neil McCormick takes a ride through the history of the ’members’ of the film world’s penis colony and while he’s ‘at it’, talks to film sexpert David Sullivan about the ever narrowing gap between the porn film industry and mainstream cinema.
Ex-Python turned film-maker Terry Gilliam watched his latest movie project the man who killed Don Quixote collapse after a succession of production disasters. Yet two young film-makers who accompanied the director on the shoot have released a documentary film about the making, and un-making, of Gilliam's epic
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
With feelgood fables like Jerry McGuire and Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe has forged a reputation as one of the Good Guys of American cinema. His new film Elizabethtown does nothing to change that perception, no matter how much he protests. "I'm more caustic than you think," he tells Moviehouse.
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.
Aspiring John Cassavetteses, Sam Mendeses and Martin Scorseses take note: Lights, Camera, Action - a seminar on video editing and production organised by Apple Computers - comes to the Music Centre on January 29
With his new movie End Of Days hitting cinemas nationwide, GABRIEL BYRNE
speaks frankly to CRAIG FITZSIMONS about the challenge of playing Satan,
US cultural imperialism and Ireland's growing economic divide.
Film director Todd Solondz has a well-earned reputation for exploring the controversial issues his rivals studiously ignore. Tara Brady gets the lowdown on his new effort Palindromes.
The inside story of Veronica Guerin, directed by Joel Schumacer and starring Gerard McSorley, Ciaran Hinds and Cate Blanchett. Rolling tape Tara Brady and Craig Fitzsimons
PETER SHERIDAN has done a remarkable job in bringing Brendan Behan s Borstal Boy to the small screen. Here he talks to hotpress CRAIG FITZSIMONS and TARA BRADY about accents, alcohol and artists
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.
The multi-part harmonies throughout have more in common with Crosby, Stills & Nash or the Byrds than with anything produced in the last few decades, which is no bad thing.
Twenty years after its original release, George Lucas sci-fi epic STAR WARS is back on the cinema screens of the world, fully restored and with several minutes of extra new footage. CRAIG FITZSIMONS explores the myth, mayhem and madness of the film, and attempts to nail down exactly what makes it so great.
Until now, that is! DAVID PUTTNAM is one of Britain s most successful film directors of the past 20 years. But, as the turn of the century approaches, he believes that the control exerted by Hollywood over the film, entertainment and information industries globally may yet inspire a violent reaction. Interview: CATHY DILLON
I HAVE realised I am in the wrong profession, or at least the wrong strand of my profession. As a film journalist I get to see films before they are released in salubrious surroundings, with food and, more importantly, drink laid on.
When Martin Scorsese made Leaving Las Vegas director Mike Figgis an offer he couldn’t refuse, the result was the British component of an unprecedented film history of the blues.
Actor Peter Mullan first achieved mainstream success with his brilliant leading role in 1998’s My Name Is Joe, for which he received a best actor award at Cannes. His latest project concerns the abuse of young women by the Catholic Church in the Magdalen Sisters, which he wrote and directed
In between attempts to appease her one-year-old daughter, Angeline Ball talks to Hot Press about her part in Bloom, Sean Walsh’s ambitious adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Every year thousands of film fans make the trip to the southern capital for the feast of cinema that is the Cork Film Festival. Hot Press looks back over the history of one of Europe’s longest-running cinematic events and checks out what this year’s packed programme has to offer. Report: Patrick Brennan
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.
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.
Fun Lovin' Criminal, pizza joint owner and garbage mogul – Huey Morgan is a man of many talents. To that you can add a film stealing cameo as a psycho-tranny in Shimmy Marcus' beleagured but proud drug mule caper Headrush.
The gate’s current production of Pygmalion reverses the chauvinistic aspects of both film adaptations. Actress Jeananne Crowley explains how george bernard shaw got his feminist groove back.
Having come to prominence as a pancaked drag queen in Cowboys And Angels, actor Allen Leech gets to massage canine testicles in Paddy Breathnach’s new film.
Shakespear s Sister siobhAN FAHEY makes her acting debut in a powerful new short movie that goes to the heart of the Dublin heroin epidemic. Here, she tells craig fitzsimons about the legitimate highs of working in both music and film.
Irish director Terry George has made one of the most powerful movies of the year in Hotel Rwanda, the Oscar-nominated film that tells the harrowing story of the genocide of the Tutsi tribe by Hutu extremists. Here, the ex-Republican activist – and former hotpress contributor – talks to Tara Brady about collaborating with Nick Nolte, Don Cheadle and Joaquin Phoenix, the challenges of bringing such provocative material to the screen, and why the West's failure to intervene contributed to the scale of the atrocity.
Why has a festival in the Nevada desert become one of the hippest happenings in the world? Irish director Dearbhla Glynn went “beyond camping” and survived to film the event and tell Olaf Tyaransen the tale
IBEN HJELJE, the female lead in the new film of Nick Hornby s acclaimed High Fidelity, is the best thing to come out of Denmark since Hamlet.
Interview: CRAIG FITZSIMONS
That a bonefide Irish film industry actually exists is no small achievement, but with a new Minister For The Arts now in place, this is hardly the time for complacency. To ascertain how best the industry can be maintained and developed, Hot Press film critic, cathy dillon, canvassed the views of a number of key players.
He’s been a Scottish warrior, a Panamanian revolutionary, a sheriff, a banker and a robot rag-and-bone man, all in the last eight years. in Scorsese’s new epic Gangs Of New York he plays, of all things, an Irishman. Brendan Gleeson holds forth on 19th century squalor, his late blooming as an actor, and the pleasure of working with big Marty.
IN THE NEW DAVID MAMET COMEDY STATE AND MAIN, AS IN HER LIFE IN GENERAL, SARAH JESSICA PARKER COULD HARDLY BE FURTHER REMOVED FROM HER SEX AND THE CITY ALTER EGO. TARA BRADY REPORTS.
With even the comparatively tranquil Euro 2004 marred by trouble on the Algarve, the issue of football hooliganism remains a live one. Now, one of its definitive texts has made it to the big screen. Craig Fitzsimons meets the men – and learns about the hard men – behind The Football Factory
Peter Greenaway’s latest film The Baby Of Mâcon has aroused critical opprobrium due to its blend of religious imagery and unnerving violence. Here, the director defends the movie, outlines his attitude to the moral guardians who object to his work and explores the importance of ritual in cinema and contemporary advertising. Interview: Patrick Brennan
Elizabeth Hurley derided as a scab ; the film industry s stars getting militant; a total shutdown in production imminent. Strange times as Hollywood prepares for a major actors and screenwriters strike. By CRAIG FITZSIMONS and TARA BRADY
From Dublin to Hollywood and from hanging around in Ballykissangel to hanging out with Al, Bruce and Tom, actor Colin Farrell is making the most of life as 'the next big thing'. "I'm a lucky bastard," he tells Craig Fitzsimons
She is already established as Ireland’s most seductive screen icon. but in Sixteen Years Of Alcohol, Susan Lynch turns in a marvellously enigmatic performance.
At the end of the last decade, Philip King was best known as a founder member of Scullion and writer of the music to the Frank O’Connor translation of the Irish lyric ‘I Am Stretched On Your Grave’. However, since setting up Hummingbird Productions with his partners Nuala O’Connor and Kieran Corrigan in 1987, he has established himself as one of the country’s leading makers of films about Irish music and culture, including acclaimed series such as Bringing It All Back Home, A River Of Sound, and Sult. Here he talks to Peter Murphy about the current Irish climate for independent film-makers, his stop-start relationship with RTE, and post-Riverdance Irishry. Pics: Cathal Dawson
Moviehouse meets the creative team behind King Arthur, the rollicking action-adventure story shot on location in County Wicklow. just don’t mention the Irish weather.
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.
40-Year-Old-Virgin star Steve Carell offers our film critic a space on his warm throne and regales her with tales of all-boys’ schools and playing Ricky Gervais’ American equivalent in The Office.
Masters of the macabre the League Of Gentlemen have now extended their reign of terror beyond the confines of sinister township Royston Vasey. Their feature film sees Tubbs, Edward and the rest of the gang set their sights on a fresh target – the real world. Interview by Tara Brady.
British Sea Power have revealed that they’re writing a new soundtrack for Man Of Aran, Robert J. Flaherty’s 1934 ‘docufiction’ on life in the Aran Islands.
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.
It took ten years for debutante director Kerry Conran to complete his film, even though most part was done before he uttered the word "Action!". Tara Brady meets the brimming brain behind the film-geek opus, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
This time last year, Mike Skinner of The Streets was a complete unknown. 12 months later, he reflects on being nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, shrugging off the attentions of Damon Albarn, turning down a stack of film roles and partying in Dublin. “There’s been a lot of mad moments,” he acknowledges
The inside story of Veronica Guerin starring Joel Schumacher, Gerard McSorley, Ciaran Hinds and Cate Blanchett. Rolling tape Tara Brady and Craig Fitzsimons
FRANCIE BARRETT rose to public acclaim in 1996 when he became the first member of the travelling community to represent Ireland at an Olympic Games. Now a documentary, Southpaw, has been released which relates the Galway boxer s story. CRAIG FITZSIMONS met him and was impressed.
Having first envisaged the film in the late ’80s, director Taylor Hackford has finally realised his long-cherished biopic of legendary soul performer, Ray Charles. Here, he talks to Moviehouse about the challenges of putting the singer’s tumultuous life onscreen.
Still on a high after his hobnob in the last issue with the Greatest Living Film Director, NEIL McCORMICK nears apoplexy as he gets to extract the closely-guarded secrets of being the Finest Actor in the World Today from DANIEL DAY-LEWIS.
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?
Having just bagged the coveted Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival, John Boorman's eagerly awaited biopic of Dublin's most notorious fun lovin' criminal, Martin Cahill, has been hailed as a silver screen masterpiece. Craig Fitzsimons hears about the physical, moral and financial perils of making The General.
Neil Jordan's controversial new film Interview With The Vampire has angered both the gay community, who objected to the dilution of the movie's homoerotic content, and the author of the novel from which it is adapted, Anne Rice, who disagreed with the choice of Hollywood golden boy Tom Cruise in the starring role.
However, with Anne Rice conspicuously recanting and the critics in the U.S. responding rapturously, signs are that this is one Vampire which won't lay down and die. Report: Helena Mulkerns
The next generation of Stanley Kubricks cut their creative teeth on some of Ireland's finest bands: hotpress.com brings you video streaming of the completed works from the Tisch film school in New York
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.
Following the lukewarm reception accorded Jackie Brown six years ago, Quentin Tarantino reached a crossroads in his career. now, following a prolonged retreat from the media spotlight, a rumoured struggle with writer’s block and his break-up with Mira Sorvino, the most influential film-maker of the nineties has made a stunning return to form with the explosive samurai thriller, Kill Bill. Craig Fitzsimons travelled to london to meet the director and discuss the film he describes as “the movie of my geek boy dreams.”
If it wasn't for the attentions of the gutter press, NICK HORNBY's current lifestyle would be pretty much blemish-free. His new novel, About A Boy, is racking up the sales figures with Overmars-like speed; he's just sold the film rights for it to Robert De Niro for #1.8m; and to cap it all, his beloved Arsenal are poised to do the league and cup
double. Tape: STUART CLARK. Pix: Mick Quinn
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.
The star of what s set to be the summer s hottest movie, High Fidelity, on love, obsession, movies, rock n roll, his pal Bruce Springsteen and the records he turns to when he s had his heart broken. With support from co-star Lisa Bonet and director Stephen Frears. Text: CRAIG FITZSIMONS
Backstage at Creamfields, JOHN WALSHE talks to FATBOY SLIM about the joys of fatherhood, being one half of the posh and becks of the chemical generation; sharing a hot-tub with Baz Luhrman and how he got Christopher Walken to tap-dance
In the second and final part of an extensive interview, director Jim Sheridan discusses his troubles with Gabriel Byrne and Noel Pearson, explains why he could marry Daniel Day-Lewis but would fail to measure up against Richard Harris, and suggests the best way forward for the embattled Irish film industry. Plus: the ouija board prophecies which seem to have shaped his life. By Joe Jackson.
First she learned to pout - then she learned to kick butt. from Revlon to Resident Evil, Milla Jovovich explains how a girl from the Ukraine conquered the world. In Prada boots, of course
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.
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.
In the second part of a major interview concerning his brief as Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht - and his vision for the future of the Arts in Ireland - MICHAEL D. HIGGINS talks about the enormous potential for job creation in the related areas of film, music and heritage, the changes he would like to see in the tax-free status afforded to artists and answers his critics in relation to Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act. Interview: JOE JACKSON
Colm O’Hare reports on the latest developments in the Irish film world which – thanks to initiatives spearheaded by Michael D. Higgins, Minister of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht – is experiencing an unprecedented boom period.
With cork set to become european capital of culture just over a year from now, Colm O’Hare reports on the cultural attractions punters will be treated to by the lee in 2005
Nearly a decade after the release of their debut single, U2 are widely regarded as the No. 1 rock band in the world. But the album and the film "Rattle And Hum" depict another kind of reality entirely. Larry, Adam and The Edge talk to Niall Stokes.
RTE is often, and rightly, castigated by the print media for sub-standard productions, but its new comedy-drama series Bachelors Walk is already being heralded as one of the station’s best ever projects before it's even half-way through its eight-part run.
STEPHEN ROBINSON goes on location to discover the secret of the show’s success
PETER MURPHY meets GAVIN FRIDAY and discovers a fascination with Kurt Weill that has led to Friday and Maurice Seezer’s Ich Lieb Dich revue at the Tivoli Theatre
Fourteen years on and people still come up to BRUCE ROBINSON and quote chunks of Withnail & I to his face. But if you don t know more about this talented, opinionated, chain-smoking, wine-guzzling writer/director, then that may be because, to put it at its mildest, he and Hollywood have never seen eye to eye. PETER MURPHY meets the angry older man
The tears have stopped falling – because those who bitterly mourned the demise of The Go-Betweens soon discovered that what they got instead was a double-helping of the weird genius which had inspired the band in the shape of solo albums from Grant McLennan and Robert Forster. With both of them releasing new records and working on a film script together, everything seems to be coming up roses. Why Lorraine Freeney even got to see a breathtaking reunion gig . . .
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.
In the past, many Irish people suffered from an inferiority complex about their own culture – about the language, music, film and literature of this island. But music is one arena where things have changed dramatically. Report: Jackie Hayden
John McCarthy’s experiences as a hostage of Islamic fundamentalists in the late ’80s form the basis of a powerful new film, Blind Flight. McCarthy here reflects on his period in captivity and discusses his ongoing growth as a writer with Craig Fitzsimons.
DAVID HOLMES is about to leave his native Belfast for New York City, where he will record his third album. STUART BAILIE took a final opportunity to speak to the artist also known as Homer. On the agenda: Hollywood soundtracks, rumours of brawling, past glories and future plans.
Pics: MICHAEL TAYLOR.
Pioneering ambient artist, film-scorer, and producer of choice for everyone from Willie Nelson to U2, Daniel Lanois has assembled one of the most impressive CVs in modern rock. And with his new album, Shine, having just hit the racks, he’s far from done yet, as he tells Peter Murphy
CHRIS DONOVAN looks at the incremental progress of the would-be King of Slane, who tells him about life, love, Christianity, veganism and scoring for films Plus: Profiles of Slane s other attractions, MACY GRAY, MEL C, BRYAN ADAMS, THE SCREAMING ORPHANS and DARA. Also: A Quickie with LORD HENRY MOUNTCHARLES
pat mcCABE is on a roll. Neil Jordan s film adaptation of his acclaimed novel The Butcher Boy has been rapturously received. His latest meisterwerk Breakfast On Pluto about a border county transvestite is about to be published. He s going on the road with Jack L. And what s more he was recently named Monaghan Man of the Year! Interview: liam fay.
Pics: Mick Quinn
First, a little brainteaser or two to warm you up. Question: What do the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and Roxy Music have in common?
Next question: Around whose demise would a fact-based film called Death At Pooh Corner rotate?
Best known as the author of the modern noir classic LA Confidential, JAMES ELLROY is back in the spotlight with his new book The Cold 6000, a factional encounter with late 20th century America.
Here, the straight-talking Ellroy tells why JFK was second-rate and J. Edgar Hoover a fiend, why Bill Clinton is a horrible human being and George W. Bush not as bad as we think, and why Martin Luther King was the greatest American man of the last century
Words: DANNY ILEGEMS
As the punk revolution took hold in the UK, Manchester was notable for the bleak, industrial soundtrack even its most successful bands were making. But that all changed with the explosion there of a new and hedonistic culture, centred in and around The Hacienda, a club run by the city's most influential music biz entrepreneur, the boss of Factory Records, TONY WILSON. The story of the transformation of the city into the centre of rock'n'roll's emerging drug and club culture – of the change from Manchester to Madchester – is told in 24 Hour Party People. With the Happy Mondays as it primary musical focus, there's no shortage of on-screen drugs and fighting – but this is really the extraordinary saga of one of the great rock'n'roll towns, in all its gory glory… Tara Brady reports
The annual Stranger Than Fiction festival is set to take place for the sixth time this September, and they're currently looking for documentary films to show.
It’s a good life being a FUN LOVIN' CRIMINAL. You get to party at your own club in Dublin, chill out in Maui, dress like "an irish soccer hooligan" and watch astral television in germany. All this and you’re a nice guy too. HUEY MORGAN tells FIONA REID about life on the town
The boys are back in town for Galway s Big Beat and SHAUN RYDER is back in the saddle. I m actually now becoming some sort of poet-film-directing-intelligent-motherfucking-artist-luvvy-darling sort of guy and it s wonderful, he tells PETER MURPHY. Pics: Michael Quinn
It is both a strength and a weakness that print journalism is so governed by the deadline. There is no ambiguity, as the courier sweeps away with the final proofs, or film or discs. Anything else is for the next issue, for tomorrow, for next year.
“I hate these questions,” cries David Holmes, DJ, re-mixer, producer, free associate, film-scorer and friend to the stars. Yet he gamely faces the pan-ish inquisition that is the hotpress mixed grill
As the RUC continues to undergo serious changes, STUART CLARK meets RICHARD LATHAM, a former officer who has a story of danger, death, politics and sex to tell
The actor, director, novelist and husband of Uma Thurman on the thrill of being a non-specialist and the challenge presented by "the greatest adventure you can have" - being in love
With Cameron Crowe s Almost Famous putting rock hackery on the silver screen, no less, Peter Murphy wonders if Seventies rock journalism is the new rock n roll. Helping him with his enquiries: PAUL MORLEY and GREIL MARCUS
Not content with dueting with Bono at the Live 8 finale in Edinburgh, Andrea Corr hits the big screen again this month in a 25-minute thriller called The Bridge.
The Mexican-Canadian Dark Angel starlet Jessica Alba gets all grown up with a lasso and leather bra in the Rodriguez/Tarantino directed film adaptation of Frank Miller's neon noir Sin City.
what good was rock’n’roll in 2001? No good at all – and yet we couldn’t have got through without it.
Peter Murphy reflects on a year in which some old codgers stood up to be counted and many of us lived “on songs and hope”
He might have been a young Einsten but instead MARK OLIVER EVERETT ended up as EELS aka a man called E aka the Souljacker. PETER MURPHY discovers how it all went horribly right
Fetishised in film and song, suicide has become part of the everyday language of pop culture. So why are schools so afraid even to talk about it? There is always a better way.
Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous offers a pleasant and almost innocent view of the life of a rock hack - sort of Little House On The Road. The reality, as PETER MURPHY explains, is rather different. Certain names in this harrowing saga have been changed to protect the guilty - and the author's delicate bone structure
When writer and documentary film-maker Jon Ronson set out to discover the truth about the secret group which conspiracy theorists believe rules the world, he expected an interesting trip. What he didn’t anticipate was a brain-rattling, five year-long odyssey, by turns wacky and scary, that would bring him into contact with neo-nazis, religious fundamentalists, twelve-foot lizards, Mr burns from The Simpsons, David icke, peter mandelson and, ahem, Ian Paisley. Olaf Tyaransen hears the story that’s coming to a bookshelf and television screen near you. undercover pictorIal evidence: Cathal Dawson
Aftering the news that The Frames are to support Bob Dylan down under, Glen Hansard's week has gotten even better as the film he co-stars in, Once, has made it into the American box-office top 20.
The already crowded music retail market here is set to get even busier with the American Borders Group unveiling plans to open its first Irish outlet in the autumn.
Oasis fans were given quite the treat on Sunday night (November 19) when Liam Gallagher stopped by the Irish Film Institute in Dublin for the premier of Lord Don't Slow Me Down.
Twenty-four years is a long time to spend working up to a debut solo album, but Roland S. Howard follows his own wayward star.
Whether participating in the jagged juvenalia of Melbourne’s Boys Next Door, lending his trademark flicknife guitar …
Airplane and Naked Gun co-creator Jim Abrahams follows his own formulas, piling bad joke upon bad joke in this spoof of the Rambo film series and the Desert Storm operation.
Nick Cave has confirmed that he and Warren Ellis will write the soundtrack to John Hillcoats forthcoming film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
Fans and festival folk heading to see the world premiere of U2 3D at Cannes Film Fest got more than expected when the world's most famous Irishmen played an impromptu set on the red carpet.
Tom Collins' Irish-language drama Kings, the historical drama series The Tudors and Lenny Abrahamson's Garage were the big winners at last night's Irish Film & Television Academy awards.
There was much celebrating in the Hansard household this weekend as the independent Irish movie that Frames mainman Glen stars in, Once, picked up the ‘World Cinema Audience Award’ at the Sundance Film Festival.
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.
Almost certainly, the wealth of detail provided on the French film industry of the 1940s will keep hardcore buffs enthralled, but for casual viewers this film may be a bit like listening to two old geezers rattling on about the war
Fun, fun, fun! A film about 300 years in the life of a violin? It would be hard to think of a less prepossessing subject for a film - The Drying of the Paint or The Growing of the Grass might at least find a certain cult niche, but this is really putting the audience to the test.
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.
A SPRAWLING, uneven, lengthy and massively entertaining scuzz-cruise through Seventies New York, Summer Of Sam might well be Spike Lee's most broadly accessible film yet, and if it sinks without trace (as I suspect it might) it will be little short of a tragedy.
Irish cinema received another major boost at the weekend, with the selection of Garage as the winner of the annual Art et Essai Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
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.
Despite the fact that it is so at odds with accepted film grammar, this undeniably bold cinematic venture manages to be both visually enthralling and fantastically powerful
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.
Francois Ozon’s latest, a clinical dissection of marital failure, is a cunning, contemplative film that relies on the implication rather than the explicit presentation of drama. As the title suggests, the film is structured episodically with five scenes from Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Stephane Freiss’ marriage.
Turtles Can Fly is the first post-Saddam film from Iraq. This will undoubtedly ensure plenty of backslapping and ‘well done old chap’ coverage for Bahman Ghobadi, the director previously best known for A Time For Drunken Horses. That’s almost a shame.
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.
While the BBC will insist on adapting Jane Austen’s masterpiece every fortnight for television, Joe Wright’s splendidly dirty (as in ancient hygiene standards, not Darcy porn) rendition of Pride And Prejudice is actually the first film version in 60 years.
The Irish Film & Television Academy (IFTA) is has announced the inaugural IFTA Music Forum, focusing on "Music for the Moving Image", will take place in Dublin on 4 September 2009.
At the centre of this inventive film is Danny Huston’s performance which lends an incredible joie de vivre and aching humanity to a character that is inescapably vile in many respects
If you break film down into the smallest possible grammatical units, then there’s a very good argument for saying that French director Claire Denis (with considerable assistance from DoP Agnes Godard) is the planet’s greatest living filmmaker.
If ever a film was destined to polarise opinion, this is the one. An insider document of the weekender/raver lifestyle, with vague similiarities to Trainspotting and a thumping techno soundtrack, Human Traffic is extremely unlikely to translate effectively to those outside the chemical-generation culture.
It is normally my responsibility, as a film critic, to communicate to you some inkling of what the film under review is actually about. Unfortunately, in the case of Saltwater, this is utterly impossible
Perry Ogden’s fine film – a loose series of naturalistic vignettes following its eponymous traveller girl – doesn’t entirely avoid romanticizing its subject.
8 Mile has opened in the States to rave reviews and a rapturous public reception. The film soundtrack, masterminded by Eminem, deserves more of the same
CINEMA ATTRACTS more over-the-top descriptions than most artistic media: we apply the words ‘hard-hitting’ and ‘harrowing’ to practically any film that shows us things we don’t want to see, no matter how trivial the context.
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.
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.
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.
Hot Press is pleased to announce a nationwide search for Irish artists to have a music video directed and produced by film students from the Tisch School of Arts, NYU.
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?
Michael Haneke’s new film fails to do anything especially compelling or original with its various narrative strands, which results in watchable but inescapably dull film fare
Catherine Hardwicke’s award winning film is an ‘issue’ film so if you find the work of Ken Loach too preachy by half, then this probably won’t float your boat.
ESSENTIALLY A warm and feelgood north-English comedy of the Full Monty variety, East Is East may not exactly cut it as a masterpiece, but it’s as enjoyable and curiously sweet as any film I’ve seen in recent weeks, and it deserves more than a good run at the “plexes.
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.
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.
With the Daft Punk film selling out ahead of tonight's screening and tickets selling fast for the Guinness Storehouse weekender, the new DEAF box office is the place to be
Possibly weirder than anything Cronenberg has done before (and we're talking about the man responsible for Crash and Naked Lunch here), Existenz is the most genuinely warped film I've seen in several years, and like most of the man's work, it leaves you quite unsure what to make of it.
It’s difficult to talk about Mad Hot Ballroom without coming over all twee and using unadorable words like ’adorable’ but it is actually a much cooler film than that might suggest.
The film has much deeper problems, though. It relies on the most hackneyed devices (courtroom applause, cutesy kids) in its attempts to deliver an emotional punch.
The very recent success of The Truman Show has irreparably blighted ED-TV's chances of cleaning up at the box office, largely due to the fact that it's a variation on the very same film: a telly company films the life of an ordinary Joe Bloggs, the public go mad for it, the star himself slowly cracks up under the strain.
Jim Sheridan’s wonderful In America forces us to think seriously about many things: family, children, immigration and the importance of making movies in Ireland.
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.
The soundtrack to the third Spiderman film features tracks from The Killers and The Flaming Lips, but the honour of lead track goes to ‘Signal Fire’ by Snow Patrol. The sound is – well, like any other Snow Patrol song: sweeping guitar chords building with percussion to the chorus.
Set over a 24-hour period in Tehran, the film deals with the lot of seven women who have found themselves on the wrong side of the law, and thereby on the fringes of Iranian society
Hey, have you seen this new Dreamworks Pictures film, The Road To El Dorado? It’s actually really really fun, even if it is just a cartoon. I had to take my nephews to see it last week, and I think I actually enjoyed it more than they did!
Hey, have you seen this new Dreamworks Pictures film, The Road To El Dorado? It’s actually really really fun, even if it is just a cartoon. I had to take my nephews to see it last week, and I think I actually enjoyed it more than they did!
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.
The tenth film version of Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liasons Dangereuses transports all the frisky goings-on to the sumptuously scarlet environs of Korea’s primly repressive late-Chosun period. And I do mean all. By focusing on the contemporaneous Catholic underground, E.J. Yong’s Untold Scandal stays faithful to the source material – or at least to Christopher Hampton’s saucy 1988 screenplay – when a delve into the mores of high-Confucian society might have been more novel.
The tenth film version of Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liasons Dangereuses transports all the frisky goings-on to the sumptuously scarlet environs of Korea’s primly repressive late-Chosun period. And I do mean all. By focusing on the contemporaneous Catholic underground, E.J. Yong’s Untold Scandal stays faithful to the source material – or at least to Christopher Hampton’s saucy 1988 screenplay – when a delve into the mores of high-Confucian society might have been more novel.
The tenth film version of Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liasons Dangereuses transports all the frisky goings-on to the sumptuously scarlet environs of Korea’s primly repressive late-Chosun period. And I do mean all. By focusing on the contemporaneous Catholic underground, E.J. Yong’s Untold Scandal stays faithful to the source material – or at least to Christopher Hampton’s saucy 1988 screenplay – when a delve into the mores of high-Confucian society might have been more novel.
The tenth film version of Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liasons Dangereuses transports all the frisky goings-on to the sumptuously scarlet environs of Korea’s primly repressive late-Chosun period. And I do mean all. By focusing on the contemporaneous Catholic underground, E.J. Yong’s Untold Scandal stays faithful to the source material – or at least to Christopher Hampton’s saucy 1988 screenplay – when a delve into the mores of high-Confucian society might have been more novel.
The tenth film version of Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liasons Dangereuses transports all the frisky goings-on to the sumptuously scarlet environs of Korea’s primly repressive late-Chosun period. And I do mean all. By focusing on the contemporaneous Catholic underground, E.J. Yong’s Untold Scandal stays faithful to the source material – or at least to Christopher Hampton’s saucy 1988 screenplay – when a delve into the mores of high-Confucian society might have been more novel.
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.
There's a nasty undercurrent to the film that frequently threatens to capsize the entire project. Thankfully, the uniformly fine performances and impressively lush aesthetic save The Heart Of Me from its failings
The 34th and final film to be made under the Dogme ‘95 banner (can we get that in writing, please?) is happily one of the better efforts from the now jaded stable. While too many works produced under the Dogme auspices have been rightly dismissed as exercises in petulant attention-seeking, Annette K. Olesen has fashioned a proper Danish film which curtseys before Dreyer’s immortal Ordet as it unravels issues of morality and belief, refracted here through the relationship between two female leads.
The 34th and final film to be made under the Dogme ‘95 banner (can we get that in writing, please?) is happily one of the better efforts from the now jaded stable. While too many works produced under the Dogme auspices have been rightly dismissed as exercises in petulant attention-seeking, Annette K. Olesen has fashioned a proper Danish film which curtseys before Dreyer’s immortal Ordet as it unravels issues of morality and belief, refracted here through the relationship between two female leads.
He has been hailed as a wunderkind of Irish theatre. Now, with his second feature film, The Actors, Conor McPherson brings his theatrical experience to bear on celluloid – with considerable success.
Belfast boy Duke Special is to perform at the Bord Scannán na hÉireann/the Irish Film Board and Culture Ireland reception, to celebrate new Irish cinema at the 60th Cannes Film Festival.
With music by Air and lyrics by Jarvis Cocker and Neil Hannon, ‘The Songs We Sing’ was always set to be a classy affair. In fact, the only weak link is Gainsbourg herself, who doesn’t particularly do it justice, delivering it in semi-bored film-star fashion. The good news is that the Jarvis revival continues at a steady but reassuring pace.
A dreamlike film, it takes the ethereal Robert Drewe novel My Sunshine as its source rather than Peter Carey’s excellent True History Of The Kelly Gang, and truncates or skips many episodes of the Kelly saga.
Where did Cornershop go with the Anglo/Indian sounds they did so well? Well, let me tell you. In 2003, they began making an film about London’s independent music industry, and ‘Wop The Groove’ is the soundtrack to this.
It needs little imagination to guess quite correctly how such a piece of music might sound. But to throw a spanner into the works, it’s X Factor ‘star’ Rowetta providing vocals. The weirdest thing is that she doesn’t even ruin it.
Having scored a bounding success with his screenplay for last year’s Man About Dog, Pearse ‘not a cat person’ Elliot makes his directorial debut with another film that might rightly be described as all dog.
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.
Undoubtedly the most accomplished film-maker in Quebec – not that there’s vast competition for that accolade – Denys Arcand’s output is always worth a look, though you need to go back to 1990’s gob-smackingly pretentious but hugely entertaining Jesus Of Montreal to find the last time one of Arcand’s films commanded significant international attention.
This single off Perry Blake’s sixth album, Canyon Songs, is straight out of a country western film. Blake’s duet with Dervish vocalist Cathy Doran is backed by a hefty dose of slide guitar. However, the lyrics are nothing out of the ordinary. For listeners interested in getting to know Perry Blake’s work, exploring the rest of the album’s tracks may be a better bet.
Before Night Falls marks a radical departure from the intimacy of Julien Schnabel’s first film, into the realms of the kind of quasi-mystical beauty not witnessed on screen since Kundun
"The characterisation is just as detailed as the beautifully drawn backgrounds and the film commendably concludes that all races need to get down together."
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.
First aired at a posh film fest in the UK last year, Greedy Baby is the audio-visual treat Plaid and filmmaker Bob Jaroc have been tinkering away on for the best part of three years. Sonically it's definitly a Plaid album, only more left of centre than previous works. Jaroc's grainy unsettling images are of limited appeal, but this double disc is worth it for the delight that is 'The Return Of Super Barrio' alone. Ain't got a clue what the 5.1 sounds like though, 'cos we still don't really know what that is.
This is a classic OST - the kind that enhances and embraces the moods of the film, rather than simply adding the cool tunes that you know (and want to buy) to its closing credits
Cats And Dogs is a highly appealing and well-executed slice of comedy which should ensure the film has crossover appeal beyond the built-in kiddie market.
Carlos Reygadas’ film starts as it means to go on – with a cartoonishly rotund, scruffy older gentleman receiving oral pleasure from a dreadlocked nymph, tear rolling elegantly down her cheek as she goes.
I wonder what Ludwig Wittgenstein would have made of Derek Jarman's film? The high-brow philosopher reportedly had a low-brow taste in movies, leaning towards westerns and musicals.
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.
There’s nothing quite like the warm sense of self-satisfaction gained from watching a 13-hour German art-house movie. Fortunately, this third installment of Herr Weiss’ soap-operatic examination of post-war Germany is a rewarding piece of film-making.
It is never a particularly auspicious sign when a film hangs around in post-production for over a year, and in The Thirteenth Warrior’s case, the process has been so protracted that director John McTiernan’s subsequent feature (the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair) has already beaten it to the big screen.
Easily the silliest and most lobotomised film release you will see all year, but guiltily funny for five-minute stretches, this plays exactly like its two predecessors
Absolutely pathetic on any number of levels, there is still a playfully awful je ne sais quoi about the film, which somehow compels you to take it to your heart.
As Godzilla charges repeatedly at downtown Tokyo, Honda conveys the destruction with an deft use of film grammar – a flick of the tail here, bang goes the neighbourhood there. Panic sweeps a nation. Radiation sickness spreads. The army mobilises. Yet beneath the chaos lurks an elegant melodrama and a taut thriller.
Stanley Kubrick’s 13th and last film in a glittering career is finally upon us, having been the subject of excessively feverish anticipation for well over a year now.
Every bit as haunting and entrancing as the Big O's ballad of the same name, but nowhere near as enjoyable, the truly terrifying In Dreams seems to finally mark the end of Neil Jordan's flirtations with anything resembling commercial mainstream cinema.
Gothic, brooding, malicious and deeply disturbing, the film is a dark-beyond-description thriller-chiller which heralds an apparent return to the more fevered style of Angel and Company of Wolves.
Once in a very long while – and only if you’ve been a very obedient, diligent sort of film critic – you find your just reward in a film that lunges off the screen, affects some kind of primal, Come To Daddy howl, slavers all over your face and leaves you stumbling into the daylight gasping for air and several stiff gins. In this manner, along lunges Park’s Tarantino-approved, Cannes conquering OldBoy, a dazzling blast of macabre fuselage from South Korea.
Yes, well, let’s remember our manners, shall we?A meticulously, lovingly crafted homage to the Art Deco aesthetic and early twentieth-century matinees, the film is entirely composed using only digital effects and actors, although Jude Law occasionally blurs the distinction between the two.
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.
This genre-bending film is simultaneously a coming-of-age fairy-tale, a time-travel sci-fi epic, an apocalyptic re-working of Back To The Future, a scathing attack on New American Puritanism and a seething side-swipe at suburban mores
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.
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.
Small Engine Repair may be Niall Heery’s first feature film, but having picked up an award for best first feature at Galway last year and several other shiny trinkets, it’s one of the most keenly anticipated Irish titles in years.
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.
Film event of the year? This depends on you. The long-awaited fourth instalment of the Star Wars series has attracted such ridiculous reams of relentless hype that it can't help but obscure the project itself - we are, after all, talking about a simple two-hour adventure/fantasy film for kids from six to sixty, not the Second Coming of Christ.
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.
Interested in seeing the interestingly titled film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan? Thanks to myspace.com's Black Carpet Screenings, we've got 20 pairs of tickets to give away on a first-come-first-served basis.
Bicke’s increasingly unhinged critique of the American Dream and the film’s eventual drone-goes-postal trajectory inevitably evokes Death Of A Salesman, while the failed assassination plot has brought many comparisons with Taxi Driver. In common with those works, Mr. Mueller’s film engages with Big Ideas about the ruthlessness of capitalism and the marketing of politics and fear. He deftly recreates the malaise of 1974 – demoralising news broadcasts, classic Herzog aesthetic, all-brown interiors – without overstatement or peppering the place with lava lamps (I counted only one safari suit), an approach which cannily reinforces the contemporary relevance of the Nixon era.
Strange, but true; Disney have never yet won the Academy Award for Best Animated Film, and that’s unlikely to change this year if there’s any justice in the world.
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.
It is very difficult to get any debate going about the banning of Natural Born Killers. The reasons are obvious. Since the film has been banned, not many people in Ireland have seen it.
Now in its fifth year, Hot Press is pleased to announce a nationwide search for Irish artists to have a music video directed and produced by film students from the illustrious Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
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.
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.
Okay, the film is very family orientated, and expects that the audience will erupt with laughter at the very mention of the word “poo”, but much more effort could’ve been put into the script, even as a relentlessly puerile exercise.
It only took Jay Haze and Samim, aka Fuckpony, a few months to write and record 'Children', but its underlying themes are the result of two lives spent on the edge. Haze and Samim's troubled experiences - including stints living homeless in San Francisco and selling LSD while touring with the Grateful Dead - are not obvious from the predominant musical soundtrack, an unusual mixture of deep old school house and wiry minimalism. However, scratch beneath the surface and cautionary tales like 'Cell Phone Hit' and 'Make Money Hoe' reveal the darker side of life. Their story probably warrants a good book or film, but until Sodebergh comes calling, we'll make do with 'Children'.
In Brotherhood Of The Wolf, former film critic turned director Christopher Gans has created a wholly original work, although there are occasionally touches of the too clever-by-half, particularly evident in the film’s camerawork.
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.
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.
This is easily the most eagerly-awaited film of all time - which is another way of saying we have been asked some 500 times when it would be coming out.
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.
Sadly, Phoenix is woefully short on incident. In the absence of any real narrative thrust, the film instead concerns itself with interpersonal intricacies.
Wasn’t there a Michael Winterbottom film out just last Tuesday? I’m starting to believe this man sleeps while propped up behind a camera on set. Not that Winterbottom’s profuse output (Jude, Welcome To Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People, In This World) and generic promiscuity has ever been to the detriment of his work, as this dreamy, low-key sci-fi quietly demonstrates.
David Holmes has confirmed to Hot Press that he will DJ a set at U2’s after-show party for their U23D film premiere in Dublin, and revealed details of his upcoming solo album due for release this year.
Now in its sixth year, Hot Press is pleased to announce the latest nationwide search for Irish artists to have a music video directed and produced by film students from the illustrious Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
Although Michell’s film is ultimately a little undone by the familiarity of its theme (yes, there’s a scene wherein our hero stumbles upon his stalker’s altar and the inevitable Clerambault’s showdown), Enduring Love is far too clever and far too engaging to be dismissed as a mere bunny-boiler.
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.
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.
What a fucking hoopla. Between Tom Cruise aggressively marketing his forthcoming merger with Katie Holmes and the furore surrounding Paramount’s preposterous (and frankly unethical) embargo on the appearance of film reviews prior to War Of The Worlds’ day-and-date planetary release, by now, odds are you’ve heard all about Mr. Spielberg’s latest venture.
Unquestionably, Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within is a seminal film with respect to CGI technology. And while most people will undoubtedly find it worthwhile only as an intermittently entertaining high-tech Manga movie, there’s no doubt at all that it would be supreme if only we were all still twelve.
WITH JULIAN Temple's film going a long way towards restoring the legend the Pistols themselves did their damnedest to defile on the reunion tour of '96, it's inevitable that we'd get the soundtrack of the repackaging of the resurrection.
But only if we let them. Draconian changes in the arts infrastructure have been proposed, the damaging effects of which will be felt for generations to come. Now is the time to shout: STOP!
If they ever get around to making Mannequin into a trilogy (we can but hope) the casting directors need look no further than the leads of Wicker Park. Indeed, the central couple are so lacking in charisma or rudimentary signs of life, their plasticity had me wondering if the film was a follow-up to Todd Haynes’ Barbie doll epic Superstar.
A musical set in modern Dublin? Starring The Frames’ Glen Hansard as a love-struck busker? Nobody believed in John Carney’s Once but, following a rave debut at the Sundance film festival, it might just prove to be the biggest Irish movie of the year
It is, I suppose, no coincidence that Denis McArdle earns a crust as a documentary film-maker, for this, his debut album, is an engaging and absorbing work, cinematic in its range and ambition
Now in its fourth year, Hot Press is please to announce a nationwide search for Irish artists to have a music video directed and produced by film students from the illustrious Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
IT HARDLY needs to be explained that Jackie Chan's latest offering is by some distance the worst film this fortnight in terms of dialogue and narrative sophistication – but as out-and-out mindless fun, it's up there with anything we've seen all summer.
Not Loach’s greatest film – arguably, not even one of his better ones – Bread And Roses still beats the living shit out of almost anything else to gain release this year
Better known these days as a shlocky horror film director, Rob Zombie’s first album since 2001's The Sinister Urge draws from a wider frame of music, with glam rock and sleek, smooth electronic grooves infusing the most potent of these new songs.
Now in its third year, Hot Press is pleased to announce a nationwide search for Irish music talent to have a music video directed and produced - for free - by film students from the illustrious Tisch School of Performing Arts at New York University.
Film buffs will be more familiar with the name Vincent Gallo as the producer, director and writer of Buffalo 66, which incidentally he scored and performed the music for, being the Hollywood Renaissance man that he is.
GIVEN HIP-HOP/film industry synergy, it's hardly surprising that the whole Wu Tang Clan-inspired Samurai-rap assassin ideal should eventually become immortalised on celluloid.
Although accusations of anti-semitism and gratuitous ultra-violence are being used to denounce the film in certain quarters, Tara Brady nonetheless contends that Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ is ultimately a poignant and overwhelming experience.
So too this fantastic film (honest), which makes for easily the best aquatic night out since they found Nemo. Preserving the quirky surrealist aesthetic of the sublime TV show (one part Tex Avery, two parts John K., one part anti-John K.), the movie sees our pure-hearted porous hero take off with Patrick the starfish on a perilous mission to rescue King Neptune’s crown and save township Bikini Bottom from the ever nefarious schemes of the Napoleonic Plankton.
Verbinski’s taut direction sees him back on form after his recent misfiring star-vehicle, The Mexican and while much of the film – particularly the central video images – plagiarises Nakata’s original, it’s difficult to criticise the well-crafted and chilling results.
The film’s focus on those who are of America but who are alienated within American institutions due to their race make it infinitely more palatable fare
Gough’s score for the film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s boy-meets-dad novel, wholly charming as it is, is not quite of the calibre of his staggering debut
After the commercial disaster that was La Passione (both the film and Rea's over-indulgent soundtrack) and last year's less than spectacular revisit to the Road To Hell (Part Two) the Middelsboro' bottle blonde returns to yet another familiar theme.
The result is a sparse, stark, yet moving film, and those keen to gloss over our own history of economic migration, not to mention career Sangatte-bashers such as Ann Widdecombe, should be strapped into chairs and made to watch this on a loop.
WIM WENDERS’ soundtracks to date have offered irrefutable proof of his seemingly flawless taste in music, but until Buena Vista Social Club, he had yet to make a music film.
Terry Zwigoff’s fabulously funny film, Bad Santa, works brilliantly as a dyspeptic black comedy, an anti- It’s A Wonderful Life, a tirade against the materialistic tackiness of the entire festive industry and a radical reworking of A Christmas Carol.
While in college studying film, Grant Lee Philips helped form a moderately successful act called Shiva Burlesque, whose 1990 album Mercury Blues opens with ‘Who is the Mona Lisa?’. After many big releases as Grant Lee Buffalo (most notably 1993’s Fuzzy), and two offerings under this moniker, Philips is back with Virginia Creeper.
Travel back in time, say, to twenty years ago. At that time few people would have believed that at a time not far into the future we would be able to watch virtually every major film that was ever made in the comfort of our own home on our television screens.
Far too convoluted for its own good, this military whodunnit’s overheated plot consists of so many daft twists and turns, the film rapidly ceases to make any sense.
Though officially this gorgeous little film is a documentary (and indeed, it’s an undeniably fascinating depiction of nomadic life in the Gobi Desert), the enterprising German (student) filmmakers have created a seamless, narrative-driven gem with whale-song echoes of last summer’s Maori hit Whale Rider – a sort of ‘Nanook of the Sands’.
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.
Deafeningly dramatic when required, but so attendant to subtle character details that it could be an Ang Lee film in its quieter moments, In The Bedroom unfolds at a stately, majestic pace, yet with an edgy, ominous undercurrent throughout
The soundtrack for the previous Spiderman film had a strong thread of emo and hard rock running through it. This collection has moved more towards contemporary indie-rock.
Belonging to the same time-travelling mindfuck genus as Donnie Darko and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Shane Carruth’s splendid $7000 dollar debut rightly took the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, beating the faux-indie Garden State to the punch.
The movie is a bit too langorous about establishing characters and themes, but the ultimately compelling depiction of entangled relationships and human frailty make it easy to see why the film has seduced critics
A weepy romantic melodrama for the wrinkled generation, Random Hearts is shamelessly sentimental stuff, but it's effective in its own manipulative way. I expected to hate it, but it was far too classy for that - and if the film isn't exactly in the Wings Of Desire league, it has a certain Club-Class style and sophistication which should sucker 90% of viewers in before they've even realised it.
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.
JON TURTELTAUB might not be the worst film-maker in existence (step forward, Michael Winner) or the most boring (my vote: Renny Harlin) but in terms of pure undiluted sentimentality at its worst, no-one lays it on quite like Turteltaub.
The three leading ladies, display acceptable comic timing and gymnastic prowess, and while the film is undeniably dumb and nonsensical, it clearly has no pretensions otherwise.
Monsieur Soderbergh’s holiday with the Ocean’s Eleven crew is intelligent where its lively predecessor was just plain old clever. This may well explain the rather lukewarm critical reception, but as a film, this is rather less of a con than the polished up Rat Pack caper.
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.
A badly wrapped perfunctory gift of a film, they really shouldn’t have troubled themselves on our account. Hell, even jingle bells socks and a seasonal tag reading ‘fuck you’ would have been more thoughtful.
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.
This film adaptation of Douglas Adams’ book/radio-programme/television show/demi-religious cult took so damned long getting here, that the author – who happily had a hand in the screenplay – never lived to see its completion. But could Adams’ convoluted sci-fi yarn, with its blend of public-schoolboy joshing, humdrum Englishness and Pythonesque surrealism survive him? Apparently so.
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.
It’s by no means the worst, most cynical or most offensive movie ever to bedevil our screens, but in terms of out-and-out dullness, My Life So Far has very few precursors in film history.
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
Thankfully, once you've sat through an opening hour, the film settles down to become a stylish and pacy yarn about missing nukes and sinister shadowy international neo-Nazi organisations
Meet The Fockers is what you might call a classic sequel. Not, sadly, in the fine tradition of Henry IV Part Two, the second Godfather film or Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-vixens, but classic in the same standardised sense as Heinz Ketchup or one of Rod Stewart’s blonde girlfriends.
End of term reviewers are a bit like film censors. As they reel in the year, there is a tendency to cut and paste according to their own prejudices and passions.
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.
The Turkish film Uzak (Distant) took the Grand Prix and Best Actor awards at Cannes last year, and it’s as grandly, haughtily arthouse in complexion as one might reasonably expect for a work thus honoured.
Not the greatest film of the year, but by several light-years the buzziest, this Hong Kong comedy has stormed the American box-office despite having English dubbed over Cantonese on the soundtrack and the word ‘soccer’ in the title.
An oddly lyrical, vaguely Hitchcockian thriller with dainty green-tea flavours and Mulholland Drive logic, Chaos isn’t quite the film we were expecting from edgy, head-wrecking horror merchant, Nakata.
According to Buzz Records in Chicago, the sound that’s created by Irish band Half Film is “music for the solitary life”. Maybe it’s appropriate, then, that we’ve interviewed them without even talking, never mind meeting face to face.
Lead Us Not Into Temptation, David Byrne’s soundtrack to Young Adam, was sublime, one of the best records of last year. Take a recent immersion in film scores and a well-known wildly wandering muse, and it’s no surprise that Grown Backwards has all the eclecticism of a soundtrack album, from vibrant chamber pop to protest songs and forwards to full-on arias. It’s like it was made by five different people.
In common with other Harry Potter films, there’s the eternal struggle to include every chapter in the book, a process which frequently feels like pouring Hagrid into a size four frock. As a result, the film is littered with non-sequitors and half-finished scenes right from the get-go.
Though the pitch for Gianni Amelio’s award winning film – distant father bonds with long-lost disabled son – may recall the well-meant condescension of Rain Man and Inside I’m Dancing, The Keys To The House somehow strikes an implausible balance between tear-jerking drama and clear-eyed depictions of impairment.
You have a film which finally can compete with the moment in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective where Jim Carrey attempts to talk through his arse in terms of sheer desperation to generate cheap audience laughs.
The deceptively parsimonious presentation – something of an authorial trademark - with natural light, dreary wallpaper and claustrophobic setting belies the complex, Hitchcockian narrative that revisits many of Leconte’s primary preoccupations. Voyeurism, dogging and love’s saving power all feature in descending order of importance. Though more prurient viewers should be advised that there’s no actual sexually explicit action, the film certainly smoulders along nicely.
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.
With so many quality movies being screened, buffs will be spoilt for choice at this year’s Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. To help you out, Hot Press has picked its 20 essential flicks, with appropriate ‘tasting’ notes.
Such is the legacy of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, doomed to be iconic in a tragically hip, meaningless way, while languishing alongside everyone’s favourite knife-wielding peacenik Bob Marley, joint in hand. Thankfully, Walter Salles’ (Behind the Sun, Central Station) excellent film does much to reclaim the man behind the T-shirt myth.
IF PEDIGREE alone paid the rent, The Floors' mastermind David Donohue would be a made man. Always ten years ahead of his time, this Carlow-born film-maker, musician, songwriter and alternative entrepreneur first made his mark in 1989 with Put Blood In The Music, an excellent documentary study of a downtown New York downtown scene that included John Zorn and Sonic Youth.
Yes folks, it's here at last: the most eagerly-awaited film in all human history, starring the almighty Rupert Everett alongside his erstwhile pal Madonna in what aspires to be a serious issue-based drama about parenting, surrogacy, homosexuality and the nature of friendship
Pedantic readers will know of this column’s fondness for love played out in strange displacements, and romance doesn’t come more twisted than the grand passions at the darksome heart of Kim Ki-Duk’s breakthrough film, re-issued (to excited yelps chez Brady) as part of the generally orgasmic Asia Extreme season at the UGC
Millions announces its implausibility by situating itself in a UK on the verge of switching to the euro. For several minutes you wonder to yourself if Danny Boyle’s follow-up to 28 Days Later is about to present the reanimated corpses of Sir James Goldsmith and Dennis Thatcher leading an attack on Westminster, or related news stories, such as, ‘hell freezes over’. Happily, the film quickly proves far too charming to sustain such notions, though it must be said that Millions is not without its fair share of the deceased.
Saved settles into a familiar teen movie rhythm, but the occasional jabs at scary US religiosity and a brace of spirited performances distinguish the film from Praeterite genre fodder.
...Especially anarchic three-piece satirical troupe Funny Girls. Comprised of local comedy stalwarts Anne Gildea, Pom Boyd and Sue Collins, they continue to bewitch Irish audiences with their masterful blend of surreal farce and lethally accurate character assasinations – and all in between book deals, film scripts, plays and the stresses of motherhood.
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.
Nice to see Father Ted’s Graham Linehan back in Dublin recently, taking a break from writing his latest project, a comedy feature film set in ‘20s Paris
It appears that the Smuggler’s Tour scheduled for Vicar St on February 18th and featuring Howard Marks and Robert Sabbag has been canceled
Tommy Tiernan is keeping schtum about his recent visit to the USA where he ‘had talks’ with TV entertainment giant NBC
For the duration of August each year, Edinburgh becomes a veritable treasure trove of artistic delights, playing host to the best in theatre, music, film and, of course, comedy.
Sam Snort is intrigued and excited by the suggestion of his friend and colleague, Michael D. Higgins, that there should be more rock'n'roll on the school curriculum, with the kiddies being educated in the finer points of video, film and contemporary media in general.
As St Patrick’s Day approaches, what better time to celebrate all that’s great about Irish culture. From music and film to food and literature, Ireland has always punched far above its weight.
With a series of new books due for publication and Johnny Depp set to star in a film adaptation of The Rum Diary, Olaf Tyaransen recounts the turbulent life and times of a literary outlaw.
Ry Cooder's last album was released way back in 1983, the fairly successful but musically undistinguished 'Slide Area'. Since then! Well, he's done the music for 'Southern Comfort' and 'Paris Texas' but hasn't as yet produced a follow-up LP. In the absence of the latter, this soundtrack album will have to keep the fans happy.
Once you see the names Brian Eno and David Holmes printed on a soundtrack tracklist, you know it has to possess at least some serious heavyweight potential.
21 Grams’ director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and writer Guilermo Arriaga’s follow up to the acclaimed Amores Perros contains career-high performances from Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and Naomi Watts. Moviehouse talks to both men about the “anatomy of pain”.
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.
Writer-director Christopher Smith has already curried a great deal of favour with such clever Brit horrors as Severance and Creep. Triangle, a smart and nifty psychological chiller, suggests that Mr. Smith has only been clearing his throat.
Mickybo And Me is a sensitive but unsentimental examination of two boys' cross-denominational friendship. Actor and screenwriter Adrian Dunbar sings its praises.
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.
A rockumentary with an edge, The End Of Innocence unflinchingly tracks sun-kissed Dublin popsters The Thrills from early success to difficult second album syndrome.
He made his name with the excellent anti-establishment drama How To Cheat In The Leaving Cert. Now director Graham Jones is back with another challenging offering in Fudge 44
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.
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.
