Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

The title of The Quiet Girl isn’t messing around: the girl, nine-year-old Cáit (Catherine Clinch) is certainly very quiet. So is everything else about the film, in fact: even the overbearing musical score by Stephen Rennicks is still very quiet and soft while it’s weighting the movie down. For his debut feature, adapted from the […]

Martin McDonagh’s best strength as a director, it is clear at this point, is that he gets to be in the exclusive business of making films with original screenplays by Martin McDonagh. With The Banshees of Inisherin, the celebrated playwright turned cinematic writer-director is now up to four feature films, and that’s ample evidence to […]

By Jaysus, is Wild Mountain Thyme a great piece of shite. Sure, and never did I see a film about Ireland and the Irish that was so desperately addicted to the most revolting cartoon stereotypes – in comparison The Quiet Man looks like a documentary, Waking Ned looks like guttural neorealism, and that episode of […]

At the dawn of the third decade of the 21st Century, I for one am ready to anoint Cartoon Saloon the finest animation studio in the world outside of Japan. The studio’s wonderful first three features – 2009’s The Secret of Kells, 2014’s Song of the Sea, 2017’s The Breadwinner – might have been enough […]

For over 50 years, dating at least back to 1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, some of our greatest actresses have spent their career doldrums playing psychopathic monsters in trashy thrillers. There is nothing noble about the hagsploitation tradition, but there is an awful lot that is dizzying, rollicking fun, seeing icons and towering screen […]

Once upon a time, there was a famous person, who made a famous piece of art, but get this: the famous piece of art was inspired by the events he experienced in his life. In other words, my friends, we have here yet another “Shakespeare in Love about _____” movie, with the blank this particular […]

I think it is time to draw Cartoon Saloon into the company of the great animation studios of the modern day. It’s not just that with The Breadwinner, a sober-minded tale of the life of a girl in Afghanistan during the height of Taliban control, makes it three-for-three good or great features from Cartoon Saloon, […]

At some point, I’d really like to see John Carney make a different movie, since he’s clearly got talent to spare as a director of actors, and his writing is an irresistible combination of aching sincerity and clear-eyed, raw naturalism. But as long as the one film he keeps making over and over again – […]

Whit Stillman has, kind of, always been making Jane Austen adaptations: his 1990 debut, Metropolitan, is a loose reworking of Mansfield Park, in addition to mentioning Austen in the dialogue, and his entire career to this point (five movies and an Amazon pilot that didn’t get picked up, in 26 years – also a 1996 […]

Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 international breakthrough Dogtooth is a bar set so high that you’d not even mind if it he never managed to leap over it again, and yet here we are: just two films later – and the director’s first film in a language other than his native Greek (it’s English and a […]

The tyranny of awards-season chatter is that it reduces interesting movies to uninteresting horse race conversation, so let’s get the dull part out of the way: yes, Brie Larson is fantastic in Room. This is only surprising if you haven’t been paying attention. Brie Larson is always fantastic. She was fantastic in Don Jon, where […]

It’s of course lazy and arguably bigoted, speaking to a cramped sample set, to suggest that Italian Filmmaker A and Italian Filmmaker B resemble each other in no small part because they are both Italian. But it is a national cinema that particularly favors enormous, lavish spectacle, and there’s never been a point since WWII […]