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Irish Times
10-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Four new films to see this week: Weapons, Freakier Friday, The Kingdom and Conor Walsh: Selected Piano Works
Weapons ★★★★☆ Directed by Zach Cregger. Starring Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Cary Christopher, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan. 16 cert, gen release, 128 min We begin with a voiceover explaining how, in the small hours of a strange morning, all but one among 18 members of the same elementary school class rose from their beds and, arms extended, ran silently into apparent oblivion. Cregger's follow up to the fine horror Barbarian goes on to tell the subsequent grim story from several perspectives: a teacher, a parent, a vagrant and so forth. The set up is neat. The acting is excellent. But we are essentially looking at the best ever Stephen King adaptation to not actually be adapted from a Stephen King story. Full review DC Freakier Friday ★★★☆☆ Directed by Nisha Ginatra. Starring Lindsay Lohan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons, Mann Jacinto, Mark Harmon. PG cert, gen release, 110 min Lohan and Curtis are back, 20 years later, for a sequel to the hugely popular body-swap comedy. This time it's a double switch with the younger woman's daughter and her imminent daughter-in-law. The results are messy but charming. Jordan Weiss's screenplay is not short of zingers. 'I put my heart and soul into those songs,' Lohan's pop-star charge whines. 'No, a 44-year-old Dutch music producer did,' comes the pithy retort. This old-school confection, smartly reuniting the original cast, delights in every silly scene. Much better than recent dire disinterments such as Hocus Pocus 2. Full review TB READ MORE The Kingdom ★★★★☆ Directed by Julien Colonna. Starring Ghjuvanna Benedetti, Saveriu Santucci, Anthony Morganti, Andrea Cossu, Frédéric Poggi. Limited release, 108 min Lesia, the 15-year-old heroine of this riveting 1990s crime saga, is hoping to go on a date with local shop-boy Fabien when she is instead deposited in a safehouse with her dad. The Corsican landscape – sun-drenched yet ominous – mirrors the uneasiness of every interaction. For all the familial complications on screen, The Kingdom neither mythologises nor tempers the Mafia. Violence lingers in the margins of mob dinners, boar hunts and bulletproof vests. The tight focus on Lesia and her realisation that the men she loves are also capable of monstrous things reinvigorates the form. Full review TB Conor Walsh: Selected Piano Works ★★★★☆ Directed by Keith Walsh. 12A cert, limited release, 64 min Touching documentary on the late Mayo-born ambient musician combines archival interviews with musical excerpts and attractive visuals. Much of those sequences could work in a gallery setting, but the film is also a touching study of a fascinating, if allusive, personality. Walsh's is the only voice we hear and, while he is elliptical about the music, he has much to (gently) tell us about a life lived under the cultural radar. He died tragically, at 36, from a heart attack in 2016. One can hardly imagine a better memorial than this quietly persuasive, impressively original project. Full review DC
Irish Times
03-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Four new films to see this week: The Naked Gun, Bring Her Back, Late Shift and Oslo Stories: Dreams (Sex Love)
The Naked Gun ★★★★☆ Directed by Akiva Schaffer. Starring Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Kevin Durand, Danny Huston, CCH Pounder. 15A cert, gen release, 85 min Neeson is, maybe, trying a little too hard to make sense of the madness in this 'legacy sequel' to the now venerable cop show parody, but the film still zips along impressively. Anderson is terrific as the deadpan romantic foil and Huston a perfect millionaire baddy. At its best when playing on the original series' linguistic misunderstandings. 'You can't fight City Hall,' the set-up lands. 'No ... it's a building.' Some of the funniest jokes are held for an extended end-credit sequence that expands brilliantly on a solid recurring gag from the original series. Full review DC Bring Her Back ★★★☆☆ Directed by Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou. Starring Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Jonah Wren Phillips, Sally Hawkins. 16 cert, gen release, 104 min The Australian directors' follow-up to horror hit Talk to Me casts Hawkins as carer to two orphaned twins with a host of neuroses. A twisted riff on Hansel and Gretel spirals into a grisly meditation on trauma, punctuated by unsettling dark-web videos, gaslighting and a supernatural ritual that is never satisfactorily explained. The film is strewn with gristle but curiously short of starts and frights. The energetic chaos of the filmmakers' breakout hit gives way to something more restrained, though not necessarily more profound. No matter: the Philippous can still freak you out with flair. TB READ MORE Late Shift ★★★★☆ Directed by Petra Volpe. Starring Leonie Benesch, Sonja Riesen, Alireza Bayram, Selma Aldin, Urs Bihler. 12A cert, limited release 91 min Benesch is superb as a nurse negotiating all kinds of crises as she takes the midnight shift in a Swiss hospital. Night Shift doesn't go for full-on social realism. One wealthy patient comes across as something of a cliche. The details of Floria's eventual meltdown would be more at home in a medical soap than in a film that, elsewhere, strives for rigorous representation of working practices. But Benesch carries us through those narrative convulsions to an ending that makes an epic of the everyday. A rebuke to those who fail to act on understaffing. DC Oslo Stories: Dreams (Sex Love) ★★★★☆ Directed by Dag Johan Haugerud. Starring Ane Dahl Torp, Selome Emnetu, Ella Øverbye, Anne Marit Jacobsen 12A cert, limited release, 110 min Confusingly, the first release from Dag Johan Haugerud's epic Norwegian trilogy is Dreams, this year's Golden Bear winner at Berlin and the second film in the sequence. A coming-of-age drama, this delightful bildungsroman follows 17-year-old Johanne (a luminous Øverbye, channelling Renate Reinsve), who falls in love with her arts and crafts teacher (Emnetu), then turns that infatuation into an erotically charged manuscript. Creatives will certainly appreciate the fuzzy intersection of memory, identity and making stuff up that jollies Haugerud's lingering drama along. Should have viewers rushing back for the next two chapters later in the month. Full review TB
