Joseph Walsh
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Film Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
★★★☆☆ Three years on from their first outing, James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy return with Volume 2. The result is a difficult second album that attempts to rekindle the hijinks of the first with a popping-candy aesthetic, but sadly lacks in narrative drive.The film opens in the 1980s. Quill’s father Ego (a digitally revitalised…
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Film Review: Beauty and the Beast
★★★★☆ It’s been nearly three decades since the release of Disney’s first attempt at Beauty and the Beast and now, like Cinderella and The Jungle Book before it, the Oscar-winning animation has been given the live-action treatment, this time with Bill Condon at the helm. Disney has been careful, as they did with previous live-action…
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Film Review: Silence
★★★★☆ God’s Will, or the lack thereof, lies at the core of Martin Scorsese’s Silence, based on the novel by the Japanese author Shûsaku Endô. It’s a contemplative, hushed tale marked with moments of violent ecstasy (in the true sense of the word), that rounds off Scorsese’s triptych of films concerning faith, following on from…
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Film Review: Fantastic Beasts
★★★★☆ Five years on from the final instalment of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, we return to the Wizarding World for an enchanting tale of magical mayhem with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. There is no Radcliffe to be found as the story opens in prohibition-era New York, some 80 years before…
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DVD Review: The Neon Demon
★★★★☆ The opening shot of Nicolas Winding Refn’s dreamlike tenth feature The Neon Demon sees Elle Fanning as rosy-cheeked model Jesse draped in macabre glory on a sofa, her throat apparently slit. Blood spools onto the floor as a photographer stares on, snapping away, Jesse’s eyes vacant. There’s a lush, albeit gruesome glory to the…
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Film Review: Boyz n the Hood
★★★★☆ “Either they don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care about what’s going on in the hood.” These are the now iconic, and still deeply relevant, words uttered by Ice-Cube’s Doughboy in John Singleton’s timeless drama Boyz n the Hood as he reflects on the struggle of the black community of LA’s Inglewood and Crenshaw.…
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Film Review: Inferno
★☆☆☆☆ How do you make the fire and brimstone of The Divine Comedy, the cobbled streets of one of Italy’s most beautiful cities and the Renaissance all dull? Simple – get Ron Howard to direct yet another film based on one of Dan Brown’s air-headed adventures. This time we contend with Inferno, the third in…
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Film Review: The Girl with All the Gifts
★★★☆☆ Colm McCarthy’s second feature film, The Girl with All the Gifts is a gory and unsettling examination of the nature versus nurture dichotomy, and proves an excellent opening gambit from young newcomer Sennia Nanua in the title role. Melanie is a bright-eyed, oddly enthusiastic child trapped within the confines of a gloomy military compound.…
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Film Review: Ghostbusters
★★★★☆ Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot has already suffered from a pre-release backlash in certain corners of the internet as fans debated whether it could live up to the 1984 original. For many, the idea of meddling with a film so fondly remembered from childhood by a generation who grew up in the 1980s is tantamount…
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Film Review: Captain America: Civil War
★★★☆☆ The Russo brothers return with Captain America: Civil War, pitting two of Marvel’s favourite sons against each other – but are you #TeamCap or #TeamIronman? Swathes of superheroes go at it and action abounds, but at the core of this film is not the light-hearted frolics of Joss Whedon’s Avengers outings. Instead, this is…