From the Archives: Kill the Messenger

Originally posted 2015 | Review by Cathal Kavanagh With a speedily propelled, exceedingly efficient plot, and produced for the comparatively paltry sum of 5 million dollars, Michael Cuesta’s thriller Kill The Messenger has an awful lot to recommend it. Well made, well told and oftentimes quite compelling, it’s nonetheless in no way destined for cult status, nor

From the Archives: The Duke of Burgundy

Originally posted 2015 | Review by Luke Bates “You’re late. Did I say you could sit?” As the film opens it seems Entomology (the study of insects) professor Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is a grade A bitch as she orders her maid Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) around her home. However director Peter Strickland soon takes us

From the Archives: Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

Originally posted 2015 | Review by Rachel Wakefield-Drohan ‘This is a true story’ proclaims the text at the beginning of Kumiko: The Treasure Hunter. In 2001 outside a city called Detroit Lakes in Minnesota, Takako Konishi, an office worker from Tokyo was found dead. The cause? She had been searching for the briefcase containing money

From the Archives: Suite Francaise

Originally posted 2015 | Review by Ciara Forristal Based on Irène Némirovsky’s posthumously published novel of the same name, Suite Francaise revolves around the German occupation of the small French town of Bussy in the summer of 1940. With her husband contributing to the war effort, Free-spirited Lucille (Michelle Williams) is confined to the stifling atmosphere of

From the Archives: Cake

Originally posted 2015 | Review by Cathal Kavanagh Let’s skip over the preamble about Jennifer Aniston’s place in the sitcom canon, her decade spent in rom-com purgatory failing to escape those shackles, and her new film Cake representing a great leap forward in the direction of the Californian becoming A Serious Dramatic Actor who acts

From the Archives: Victoria

Originally posted 2015 | Review by Amelia McConville Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria premiered in the Berlinale-Palast theatre, just off the high-rise bustle of Potsdamer Platz, at the heart of Berlin, a fitting location for a film that immerses itself so fully in the city. Yet ‘Victoria’ presents to us an even more intense experience of the many-sided

From the Archives: Inherent Vice

Originally posted 2015 | Review by Eoin Moore Inherent Vice is a neo-noir comedy from Paul Thomas Anderson based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon, following a trail of corruption and debauchery through L.A. in the early 70s. The dying breaths of 60s optimism hang over the film’s world; the potheads, dopers, and weirdos are

From the Archives: Sully: Miracle on the Hudson

Originally posted 2016 | Review by Natalie Burke On January 15th 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 had to make an emergency water landing on the Hudson River due to bird strike. This saved the lives of 155 passengers and crew members. The pilot responsible for this incredible feat was Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger. This actually happened. Sounds

From the Archives: American Sniper

Originally posted 2015 | Review by Cathal Kavanagh Bonafide cinematic legend, and renowned addresser of symbolic empty chairs Clint Eastwood’s latest film joins a long list of motion pictures with titles including the word “American” alongside another appropriate noun. Graffiti. Beauty. Psycho. Unlike a number of those other films, however, “American Sniper” could easily be split

From the Archives: Foxcatcher

Originally posted 2015 | Review by Lachlan Baynes Bennet Miller’s latest film Foxcatcher is relentless. It is relentlessly bleak in its depiction of 1980s America, relentlessly critical in its deconstruction of the American drive for success, and relentless in its movement towards inevitable tragedy. Foxcatcher tells the true story of John E. Du Pont (an