Domhnall Gleeson

News, Reviews & Features

mother!

Movie Review | Ali Gray | 11th September 2017

I've had nightmares like mother!, proper sweat-drenched, bolt-upright air-gaspers that have left me shaken for hours. The ones where ordinary, mundane events turn hellish in an instant. The ones where your loved ones are there too but they're in on the bad juju, their blank faces betraying the feverish insanity you feel. Mother!, the new movie from Darren Aronofsky, is the closest a film has ever come to replicating one of those bad dreams; how quickly the drip-drip-drip of reason gushes into madness, how helpless we are in the face of our own demons and how it's always the ones we love that hurt us most. That exclamation mark in the title does not signify a comedy - it's the kind you see shortly before you plummet off a cliff.

Read full article »
American Made

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 30th August 2017

I'm sorry, the old Tom Cruise can't come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, because he's DEAD.

Read full article »
The Revenant

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 25th January 2016

Poor Oscarless Leo. Just imagine the soul-crushing frustration that must come after enduring unimaginable feats of survival in the making of this film, only for everyone instead to talk about the (false) rumour that you get raped by a bear in it. Imagine having the fortitude of character to eat raw bison liver and climb inside a dead animal carcass for the sake of your art and then have all your efforts overshadowed by the collective public thinking that, at one point in the movie, a horny grizzly surprises you with a sexual ambush. And the worst part is, with all attention on that ridiculous story instead of Leo's dedication to his performance, it might actually cost him the Oscar. That bear might just end up fucking Leo after all.

Read full article »
Unbroken

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 28th December 2014

Arguably my generation doesn't know it's born, but it's not that I'm unmoved by tales of World War Two heroism. If anything they serve as a reminder that millions sacrificed their lives for my freedom and now I'm making dick jokes on the internet. I do think these stories deserve to be treated without recourse to emotional manipulation, though. Unbroken might have been a quiet examination of determination and the human spirit, but overshoots in trying to emphasise how inspirational it is.

Read full article »
Frank

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 9th May 2014

For all you hear about makers of independent film having now migrated to TV, you still get some belters. In just the last fortnight we've had the masterfully tense revenge thriller Blue Ruin and now Frank, a gleefully nuts music movie based on Jon Ronson's experiences playing keyboards for Frank Sidebottom. When you can convince a star like Michael Fassbender to wear a huge fake plastic head for a role, you can probably say with some certainty that indie film's not dead yet.

Read full article »
Advertise with us!
Black Mirror: Be Right Back

TV Review | Ed Williamson | 13th February 2013

You read a million articles a week about the creeping ubiquity of technology. Most of them adopt a negative tone from the get-go: statistics showing the high numbers of online interactions we make are offered as evidence that they're replacing our real-life ones, without the idea that they might in fact be supplementing or even enriching them ever raised. This simple scaremongering fear of the unknown is absent in Black Mirror. It's written by people who embrace technology, and use this knowledge to imagine its dark potential. And it is at times quite brilliant.

Read full article »
Dredd

Movie Review | Ali | 3rd September 2012

Dredd, of course, is not the first time we've seen the surly 2000AD lawman on screen. The first adaptation was, to put it bluntly, dreddful: completely mishandled, badly cast and creatively bankrupt. Fans were not happy, and with good reason. I mean, I can just about understand the casting of Martin Shaw, but relocating the story from Mega City One to the British legal system was bizarre and the recasting of the title character as a lovelorn High Court Judge was sacrilege. Hang on. Oh. Yeah, never mind. I was reading the Wikipedia page for BBC1 legal drama 'Judge John Deed'. I guess most of what I said also applies to the 1995 Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd movie. Except the bit about Martin Shaw.

Read full article »
Shadow Dancer

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 22nd August 2012

Unlike its namesake, a game for the Megadrive in which a ninja and his dog beat up a lot of other ninjas, James Marsh's Shadow Dancer is about the Troubles. This puts me in the awkward position of having little background knowledge of the Troubles to contribute, largely because I spent too much of my youth not doing my history homework so I could play Shadow Dancer on the Megadrive. You can see the bind I'm in.

Read full article »

Support Us

We are now using Patreon to cover some of our hosting fees. So if you like our brand of "content" and would like to see us do more, please consider chucking a few digital pennies our way by clicking on the link below. Thanks!