
Film reviews: Harvest is a starkly-shot eulogy for an old world
But just as the feasting commences, Master Kent (Harry Melling) unveils his big idea: That instead of simply subsisting from year to year, the villagers should abandon agriculture and focus their combined efforts on rearing sheep and providing woollen garments for the well-to-do in the distant cities.
Walter (Caleb Landry Jones) hears in the suggestion the death knell for his community and their way of life; and when the landowner Master Jordan (Frank Dillane) arrives to enforce the new dispensation with a handful of paid thugs in tow, the scene is set for a culture clash that erupts into vicious violence.
Adapted from Jim Crace's novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013, and directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari, Harvest is a fever-dream interpretation of the collision between incipient capitalism and the agrarian culture that has served the villagers for countless generations.
Walter's is a tough life of hand-to-mouth existence and self-regulating justice — a pair of interlopers, accused of burning Master Kent's barn, are summarily consigned to a week in the stocks on the master's orders — but Master Jordan's alternative will render all but a handful of villagers homeless and doomed to starve.
It's a stark choice, and Tsangari doesn't pretend that the villagers' lives are idyllic: Shot in relentlessly muted colours by cinematographer Sean Price Williams, the village is a grimly muddy, weed-ridden shambles, their behaviour crude and brutal.
Caleb Landry Jones is terrific as Walter, his voiceover monologues delivering a primitive poetry eulogising the natural world, and he gets excellent support from Harry Melling as the well-intentioned but morally weak Master Kent, and Frank Dillane as the creepily oleaginous villain Master Jordan.
Friendship.
Friendship
★★★☆☆
Cinema release
Friendship (15A) stars Tim Robinson as Craig, a socially awkward app developer who strikes up a rapport with his new neighbour Austin (Paul Rudd), a weather reporter on local TV.
Introduced to Austin's friends, Craig suddenly finds himself part of a buddy network for the first time — until he oversteps the mark at a party and finds himself excluded. Can the emotionally vulnerable Craig winkle his way back into Austin's good books?
Written and directed by Andrew DeYoung, Friendship is either a masterpiece of narrative dissonance or a poorly scripted vehicle for Robinson's comedy schtick.
The tone veers back and forth from the cringe comedy of Craig's inappropriate behaviour into something a little darker, as the painfully self-aware Craig, who seems to be operating without any kind of social filter, makes Herculean efforts to behave according to societal norms.
It's funny, certainly, and particularly when it comes to Craig's blurted non sequiturs (Robinson's comic timing is to die for); but there's also an uncomfortable sense that we are supposed to be laughing at Craig's inability to connect, rather than at those who ridicule his behaviour.
Four Letters of Love
Four Letters of Love
★★☆☆☆
Cinema release
Set in Ireland in the 1970s, and adapted by Niall Williams from his own novel, Four Letters of Love (12A) stars Fionn O'Shea as Nicholas and Ann Skelly as Isabel, star-crossed teenage lovers who are destined to meet and embark on a life-long romance.
Chance encounters and divine intervention play their part in bringing together and/or thwarting the young couple; also aiding and abetting are Nicholas's artist father William (Pierce Brosnan) and Isabel's poet father Muiris (Gabriel Byrne), who are married to Bette (Imelda May), and Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), respectively.
Director Polly Steele employs a narrative framing device that involves the older Nicholas, now a writer, telling the story of Nicholas and Isabel — which accounts for the characters' excessively florid dialogue; the script itself is a mish-mash of Oirish clichés that wastes a very fine cast.

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Irish Times
7 days ago
- Irish Times
Friendship review: This twisted buddy-buddy movie is funny but not much fun
Friendship Director : Andrew DeYoung Cert : 15A Starring : Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara, Jack Dylan Grazer, Rick Worthy, Whitmer Thomas, Daniel London, Eric Rahill Running Time : 1 hr 41 mins Tim Robinson, star of the cult sketch show I Think You Should Leave, moves satisfactorily into cinema with a comedy that sits just outside the buddy-buddy mainstream. How do we thus place it on the map? Well, it begins with Tami and Craig (Robinson and Kate Mara), a suburban couple, at a counselling session where she addresses her recovery from cancer and expresses her difficulty in achieving orgasm. Andrew DeYoung, in his debut as writer and director, is plainly skirting the realm of indie alienation. There is a suppressed fury in Robinson's performance – a whisper of bitter loneliness – that passes unexpected levels of stress on to the poor viewer. It's funny, but it's never exactly fun. The story properly kicks off when Craig, who is trying to sell his house, returns a wrongly delivered package to a new neighbour up the street. This turns out to be Austin, a handsome TV weatherman in the form of the ageless Paul Rudd. The two get chatting and end up forming an initially successful friendship. DeYoung's screenplay can't quite decide what we are to make of Austin. On their first night of boozing, he takes his neighbour on an illicit tour of an underground aqueduct that eventually leads them into the city hall. He plays in a punk band. The notion appears to be that he's an offbeat guy locked in a straightedge job. Yet the more the film goes on – and the more Craig takes on the persona of stalker – the less out-there Austin appears. Are we initially seeing the man that our anti-hero thought his neighbour to be? READ MORE At any rate, though loose in structure, Friendship offers a few minor masterpieces in the art of cringe. Robinson, like Adam Sandler in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, gives some impression of how the classic saddo of broad comedy – the Jerry Lewis, the Norman Wisdom – might appear in something like the real world: scary, demented, potentially threatening. His wide, gap-toothed grin is that of the killer clown. His tight face seems always on the point of bursting open in a mess of bloody tendons. We (if we are men) are invited to laugh at him while worrying that we're laughing at the worst, most pathetic aspects of our own personalities. Not a cheery sort of hilarity. In cinemas from July 18th


Irish Times
7 days ago
- Irish Times
Harvest review: Trippy medieval parable where allegory overpowers the drama
Harvest Harvest Director : Athina Rachel Tsangari Cert : 18 Genre : Folklore Starring : Caleb Landry Jones, Harry Melling, Rosy McEwen, Arinzé Kene, Thalissa Teixeira, Frank Dillane Running Time : 2 hrs 11 mins Athina Rachel Tsangari, sometime Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator and leading light of the Greek Weird Wave, returns to features following a nine-year hiatus. Harvest, her first English-language film, is a trippy medieval parable drawn from Jim Crace's novel of the same name. Although imbued with the same off‑kilter humour that powered Attenberg and Chevalier to international success, here Tsangari pursues an angular, folkloric register, situating her story in an unnamed Scottish border hamlet confronted by enclosure, cartographic bureaucracy and outsiders blamed for an unexplained blaze. Walter Thirsk, portrayed by Caleb Landry Jones with fraught fragility, occupies the nebulous space between peasantry and gentry; childhood ties bind him to benevolent yet ineffectual landlord Master Kent ( Harry Melling ). Their complicated kinship – both recent widowers – grants the picture its most persuasive emotional anchor. Around them swirl suspicious villagers, mysterious wanderers and the comparatively worldly map‑maker Earle (Arinzé Kene), whose parchment lines foreshadow dispossession. The arrival of Kent's ambitious cousin Jordan (Frank Dillane) hastens the transformation of fields into profitable pasture, pushing the settlement toward further fracture. READ MORE Cinematographer Sean Price Williams lenses mud, mist and ember skies with handsome texture – 16mm grain and flares showing – producing tableaux that recall Bruegel as much as Gaspar Noé. Tsangari's taste for ritual detail – a buttercup dabbed across a child's cheek before the Gleaning Queen selection, the burning of a corn dolly – creates searing imagery. Unhappily, the film's allegorical ambitions overpower its drama. Often-hapless characters frequently stand for positions rather than pulse with personality or motive, slowing momentum across an already‑stretched running time. When violence finally erupts – a humiliating shaving, a ghastly pillory interlude – the shock registers, but the preceding drift lessens the impact. Landry Jones and several co-stars, capable of real and feral unpredictability, are restrained by dialogue that sounds stock. There's plenty to admire – the earthy sound design, inventive point‑of‑view shifts, flashes of sly humour – while simultaneously yearning for the vivacity that enlivened the director's earlier work. Like the village it depicts, the film is meticulously crafted yet oddly two-dimensional: a map, not a place.


Irish Examiner
18-07-2025
- Irish Examiner
Film reviews: Harvest is a starkly-shot eulogy for an old world
The sheaves are being brought in as Harvest (18s) opens, and the villagers of a tiny medieval commune nestled in 'fields far from anywhere' are preparing to celebrate. But just as the feasting commences, Master Kent (Harry Melling) unveils his big idea: That instead of simply subsisting from year to year, the villagers should abandon agriculture and focus their combined efforts on rearing sheep and providing woollen garments for the well-to-do in the distant cities. Walter (Caleb Landry Jones) hears in the suggestion the death knell for his community and their way of life; and when the landowner Master Jordan (Frank Dillane) arrives to enforce the new dispensation with a handful of paid thugs in tow, the scene is set for a culture clash that erupts into vicious violence. Adapted from Jim Crace's novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013, and directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari, Harvest is a fever-dream interpretation of the collision between incipient capitalism and the agrarian culture that has served the villagers for countless generations. Walter's is a tough life of hand-to-mouth existence and self-regulating justice — a pair of interlopers, accused of burning Master Kent's barn, are summarily consigned to a week in the stocks on the master's orders — but Master Jordan's alternative will render all but a handful of villagers homeless and doomed to starve. It's a stark choice, and Tsangari doesn't pretend that the villagers' lives are idyllic: Shot in relentlessly muted colours by cinematographer Sean Price Williams, the village is a grimly muddy, weed-ridden shambles, their behaviour crude and brutal. Caleb Landry Jones is terrific as Walter, his voiceover monologues delivering a primitive poetry eulogising the natural world, and he gets excellent support from Harry Melling as the well-intentioned but morally weak Master Kent, and Frank Dillane as the creepily oleaginous villain Master Jordan. Friendship. Friendship ★★★☆☆ Cinema release Friendship (15A) stars Tim Robinson as Craig, a socially awkward app developer who strikes up a rapport with his new neighbour Austin (Paul Rudd), a weather reporter on local TV. Introduced to Austin's friends, Craig suddenly finds himself part of a buddy network for the first time — until he oversteps the mark at a party and finds himself excluded. Can the emotionally vulnerable Craig winkle his way back into Austin's good books? Written and directed by Andrew DeYoung, Friendship is either a masterpiece of narrative dissonance or a poorly scripted vehicle for Robinson's comedy schtick. The tone veers back and forth from the cringe comedy of Craig's inappropriate behaviour into something a little darker, as the painfully self-aware Craig, who seems to be operating without any kind of social filter, makes Herculean efforts to behave according to societal norms. It's funny, certainly, and particularly when it comes to Craig's blurted non sequiturs (Robinson's comic timing is to die for); but there's also an uncomfortable sense that we are supposed to be laughing at Craig's inability to connect, rather than at those who ridicule his behaviour. Four Letters of Love Four Letters of Love ★★☆☆☆ Cinema release Set in Ireland in the 1970s, and adapted by Niall Williams from his own novel, Four Letters of Love (12A) stars Fionn O'Shea as Nicholas and Ann Skelly as Isabel, star-crossed teenage lovers who are destined to meet and embark on a life-long romance. Chance encounters and divine intervention play their part in bringing together and/or thwarting the young couple; also aiding and abetting are Nicholas's artist father William (Pierce Brosnan) and Isabel's poet father Muiris (Gabriel Byrne), who are married to Bette (Imelda May), and Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), respectively. Director Polly Steele employs a narrative framing device that involves the older Nicholas, now a writer, telling the story of Nicholas and Isabel — which accounts for the characters' excessively florid dialogue; the script itself is a mish-mash of Oirish clichés that wastes a very fine cast.