What have you watched recently? 3D!

Some from the Dublin Film Festival.

The Last Viking

My favourite film from the festival. Mads Mikkelsen is entrusted by his brother to bury stolen money. When the brother gets out of prison 15 years later Mads has developed dissociative identity disorder and insists on being called John as he thinks he is John Lennon. His brother has to go along with the fantasy to get Mads to remember where he buried the money.

It’s a very funny, very black comedy, the type of film Scandinavia cinema seems to produce a lot. Like another great Danish film, Another Round, the comedy comes from a dark subject, the trauma caused by childhood violence and repressed memories. But this is ultimately a fantastic crowd pleaser. See it in a packed cinema.

Couture

Alice Winocour is one of my favourite directors so it was nice to see her in person at the festival. Her new film is set in the Paris fashion world, so not exactly a topic I would be interested in.

Angelina Jolie is an American film maker (speaking French) who arrives in Paris to film a fashion show. The film focuses on various characters (models, a make-up artist, various film people) and the ensemble cast and sometimes overlapping storylines almost make it seem like a Robert Altman film. But it’s typical Winocour, always interesting, visually easy to look at, very French.

Wolves

A Swiss film set in the world of black metal. A girl fancies the new singer in her cousins band so goes on tour with them working the merchandise stall. She get close to the singer but when a photo of a fascist logo tattoo he has gets online the band are in trouble. The film puts you right into the world of black metal. Life on the road, gigs, parties. Then gets dark when the band start to play some dodgy places with fans who are into extreme right wing ideology. Very intense film.

One Last Deal

Danny Dyer was there at the world premiere of his new film, shot in Ireland and directed by Brendan Muldowney. The film is entirely set in one location and Dyer is the only actor on screen. He plays a football agent who’s day is spiralling out of control as he tries to get a new deal for his premier league footballer client while having to deal with a caller who is threatening to blackmail him. The film manages to wring a lot of tension out of one room and a man talking on the phone for most of it.

Danny Dyer, foulmouthed and funny, gave an entertaining Q&A and afterwards everyone was invited to the bar next door for drinks. Not the type of thing film stars usually do after their film screens. He seemed to be very approachable.

Day after tomorrow is the worst film I have ever seen and one of the two films I left the cinema during in my life. Closely followed by Alexander with Colin Farrell and all the Disney Star Wars.

Ballad of a Small Player 2025

As a gambler if youd have told me there was a film about Colin Farrell playing punto banco in Macau I would have said surely not, but there it is on Netflix.

Perhaps if you dont gamble this might not hit any notes, but if you do like a flutter I can’t think of a better portrayal of a degenerate gambler in film than Farrells performance as ‘Lord Doyle’. The film manages to pack in every feeling in the spectrum of a life of full time gambling, the despair, the excess and the running out of joy.
For me its Farrells best performance to date, probably because some part of him had lived some of this life already.

Has anyone here watched War Machine on Netflix?

It's astounding the amount of posts on social media proclaiming it as one of the best sci-fi, action, war movies of recent years.

I watched it and it's the most painfully generic, Chat GPT written drivel I've seen in a long time. There's nothing remotely original about it, apart from Alan Ritchson the cast are completely undeveloped and forgettable, and it's borderline spoof at times with conveniences and illogical nonsense.

For anyone who's actually seen it….

Jesus I disliked this movie so much, I genuinely cannot understand people who say it's brilliant or frankly even good. The first 20 odd minutes were grand, and then the end was kinda okay, but the entirety of the 70 odd minutes in between was the most generic SyFy channel original movie content imaginable.

It reminded me of one of those Asylum movie productions, where they rip off big budget blockbusters with similar plots on a fraction of the budget, just with better CGI.

I watched it last week. Have to agree with all your comments. I thought it was a very silly movie.

I was thinking the same thing about the guy on the stretcher. Cat with 9 lives. When the film was going through editing and the final review, I don't know how someone didn't pipe up and point out the ridiculousness of that particular point. That's almost like something you'd see in The Naked Gun - a spoof of a guy being dragged along the road, and banging his head of speedbumps

Sinners (2025)

Despite all the hype and 5 star reviews, i found this movie to be average at best. Maybe some tighter editing and a bit less of the musical scenes would have made it a better watch. Reminds me of a 1930s version of From Dusk til Dawn.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

If I had Legs I’d Kick You – 8.5/10

The reviews for this tend to be very mixed, but this worked for me. It was a real cinematic experience that utilized the surround sound brilliantly. When it comes to this year’s batch of Oscar nominees, Marty Supreme shares a lot of similarities (Josh Safdie has a producer credit); they’re both highly stressful films which feature collapsed ceilings, a reckless protagonist, and babies crying. 

The cinematography is up close and intrusive to the point where it feels suffocating. Rose Byrne is on screen for the entire film and puts in what I think will be remembered as one of the performances of the decade. It’s a shame she’s up against Buckley, as any other year she would be taking home the golden statue. 

As someone who doesn’t have kids and sometimes struggles to relate emotionally to films about mother/fatherhood, this did a great job of putting you in the shoes of a struggling Parent. It’s another solid film to add to the ever-growing pantheon of anxiety fueled cinema, alongside Uncut Gems, The Teachers Lounge, Full Time and (the first hour of) Beau is Afraid.

Aye, I thought this was very good myself. Byrne is excellent in it, but it's not an easy watch.

I remember watching 'John's Not Mad' in the 80's. The next day in school all the kids were going around pretending they had Tourettes. It was the first time any of us had heard of the condition.

In later years, of course, I've come to realise just how debilitating it can be for someone that has to go through life with it. It must be an awful thing to live with, especially the verbal kind where you just have no control over what comes out of your mouth.

I understand poor John shouted "nigg*rs" at the BAFTAS too, when the nominations were being read out by Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo. The embarrassment the poor man has to live with on a daily basis must be incredible.

Wasteman in the cinema. Anyone who saw David Jonsson’s role as Gus in Industry (my favourite TV of the last few years) will know this boy can act. Here he stars as a prisoner reaching the end of his sentence who gets a new cell mate intent on causing as much havoc within the prison hierarchy as possible – and with that Jonsson’s character’s chance of exiting. Tom Blyth (who I hasn’t really seen before) is equally impressive as the new arrival into the prison system. It’s in familiar territory to other UK prison staples Scum and Starred Up, and though it doesn’t really offer anything new to the genre, it manages tension very well. Not for the squeamish and certainly not a date movie, it’s a compelling watch nonetheless. I’m not sure if it was a low budget film, or deliberately shot to have a low budget feel (hard to tell these days) but regardless I’d give it a strong 8/10.

No Other Choice on MUBI. From the director of The Handmaiden and Oldboy Park Chan-wook, I had intended to see this in the cinema when it was released here but it only stayed for a week from what I could tell and I was travelling at the time with work so had to wait until now to watch this. You can view this as a dark comedy about a man who loses his job and is desperately seeking to resolve that by any means possible, or as a critique of upcoming mechanisation of work and the replacement of human workers through tech and AI and the consequences when man is stripped of purpose. TBH, both work. Though darkly comedic at times, it’s also much deeper than that. An enjoyable 7.5/10.