The final trilogy in the Skywalker saga has been all about new powers, old faces, and force ghosts. The biggest flaw with the Disney installments has been their formulaic scripts but The Rise of Skywalker manages to hold onto a few surprises which just about rescue this installment.

I didn't watch this film with five star expectations, The Force Awakens thought me that, but The Last Jedi recovered some of the magic that you expect from a galaxy far far away, enough to pump me full of the right level of excitement to make me abandon my family to watch this over Christmas.

At the heart of it, episode nine is a tragic love story that breaks the rules, too many rules for some fans, but it's intrinsically beautiful if you can tuck yourself into the film....which may be difficult given Emperor Palpatine's unimaginative evil resurgence.

I'd consider myself a fan of the Star Wars universe (obviously) but to be honest I didn't enjoy the amount of gaps in Palpatines story and it's hard to forgive the vagueness of the sith world. The prequels created a thirst in me for sith darkness and this neat production failed to delve into the well of the darkside. Also the emperor just isn't frightfully evil enough, sure he mercilessly pops planets but what happens in the realm of galactic dictatorship, where are the riches, the bounty hunters, the cities that worship the dark lord?

I also would have liked to see more from Kylo, but I guess he's not Anakin. The movie opens with Kylo hunting down the emperor to slice him in two which would allow him to rule the first order but the encounter is weak, does he accept the emperor's rule, should there be more conflict, could these dark forces be pitted against one other for control of the Galaxy resulting in space battles like never seen before?

The outcome was a bit too Disney with a simplified showdown between Sith and Jedi, with Ren & Rey left to choose sides while that onscreen chemistry developed into the greatest love story ever told.

​The film produced one of the best fight scenes in the history of Star Wars, in contrast with Anakin's fight with Obi Wan in a pit of lava, Ren & Rey dual on top of a sunken death star in the middle of the ocean with towering waves curling up around them. Cinematic, powerful, and ultimately spellbinding.

Our daz white Disney star is far more appealing in this installment also, she's a real hero and the morale goodness of the Jedi shines through her. Her battle with the darkside and forcecalls with Kylo are tantalising enough to give the story enough depth to make you root for the rebels once more.

For this alone it's worth watching how the Skywalker timeline concludes, sure it could be darker at times, like we'd all have preferred to see Cheewie being captured and tortured with some tweezers and it would have been more interesting if the emperor had a personality but it is what it is. It has all the joys of Star Wars with a gentle touch that makes this an enjoyable installment. By itself it's a classic battle of good versus evil, an endearing love story, and a hero that you can believe in. Enjoy the final Skywalker movie and may the force be with you.

Image by @elithienart

Looking back over 90’s movies with special effects can sometime be cringe to the point of being unbearable but Alita helps us forget the time before CGI by seamlessly integrating computer generated characters with regular old movie stars. I now believe that robot children and Hollywood A-listers can finally live side by side without developing into a messy lawsuit years later.

Alita Battle Angel is a CGI master class that changes the face of entertainment in the same way Avatar did back in 2009.  This film is the 21st century equivalent of ballet, its peak entertainment and there is a whole lot more to come as a result. This film showcases CGI being integrated in perfect harmony with traditional cinema, prepare to enter a fantasy world without even noticing.

Alita holds a great storyline, it feels more like a limited series in the sense that it’s not rushed together or chasing towards an impossible ending. There are plenty of characters to like and hate which helps give a sense of depth and reality to the movie, while also introducing elements of comic book seduction much like Sin City did. There are also plenty of different areas of interest in IronCity, it’s a wonderful landscape all by itself, from the streets to the underground, from the Sky City to the badland lakes. There are also dark elements to this wonderful city from sinister Hunter Warriors, to body part collectors, and characters driven by self interest regardless of cost.

The cyborg Alita begins her reawakening as a child android on a path to self discovery. Thirty minutes in and she’s into adolescent phase discovering bad boys, motorball, and chocolate which adds to the humour of the film. It also develops into a cute love story which makes you wonder if Twitter bots are all that bad, can humans love automated intelligence, is there room for botboyfriends in the real world? This film holds the answer to that question.

What makes this movie so intriguing is how you get drawn into caring for the young robot with  android eyes and a human brain, ultimately Alita is a relatable character, more so than say Scarlet Johansson’s attempt at playing robot consciousness in Ghost in the Shell, similar concept, one clear winner. Alita has such a hidden history that we only get to discover the tip of the iceberg in this installment, I can only imagine there will be sequels and prequels to dive into this fantasy world in years to come, this could very well be a universe to potentially match the Star Wars realm and it might just be time to hang up your lightsaber.

The best thing that can be said about this movie is that it is literally a film for everyone, there is nobody on this green earth that could possibly dislike it, it’s an action packed righteousness adventure where dog lovers triumph and bad guys get punished. Alita not only has a human heart but also has a touch of soul that resonates with everyone. This is one film you shouldn’t miss if you’re emotionally ready for the future of cinema, the technology is here and it may very well be the perfect time to remake “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” as well as opening up the real potential of visual entertainment like you never imagined possible. 

Who’s going to dance the protagonist? The question is asked, the spell’s been cast, and you fall under the influence of Mother Suspiria.

This is what it feels like watching Suspiria, that all the while during this movie you are part of the spell, captivated by the symbolism and violence of a coven that practice the dark arts and dwell in pure evil.

Keep in mind that this is not an easy movie; I went to see this in the IFI where you’d expect a more tolerant audience, but given the grotesque nature of the coven and their chilling malevolent actions people turned away from the screen and several people walked out. Most definitely not a date movie and not one to watch with the folks, unless you’re the Adam’s Family or super weird like Kevin Spacey.

I’ve mentioned symbolism, if you’re going to go see this movie keep an eye on all the various symbols on screen, because it’s very unlikely you’ll watch this movie twice due to the brutality of some of the scenes, so you might only have one chance to catch everything.  One of the themes of this movie is the question of why do people willingly conduct acts of violence. It asks if people are born evil or do they turn that way. It also asks the question do people see the evil and violence around them, and importantly if they do how do people then live with their shame and guilt.

The film has a historical context, set in Berlin in 1977 there is more conspiracy going on here than in Bridge of Spies. There are kidnappings, hijackings and whispers of all kinds of violent terror heard on snippets of the news. The movie also has plenty of references to WW2 and Nazi Germany. In his rise to power Hitler promised to restore faith in the Volk which would bring wholeness to Germany while accusing other politicians of destroying German unity.

In Suspiria Madame Blanc teaches her dance “Volk” to an aspiring young dancer Susie Bannion;

“When you dance the dance of another you make yourself in the image of its creator” she tells her in one of the most bewitching scenes in the movie.  

Joining the coven has it’ benefits, food, shelter, motherhood. The dancers speak about the love they feel in the academy but ultimately there are consequences for leaving and trying to tear the family apart.

Chloë Grace Moretz plays the distraught role of Patricia, a dancer who has escaped the academy. She sets the tone of the movie from the very beginning with a visit to psychologist Dr Josef Klemperer. There appears to be a background story here, as the doctor has a case file on Patricia, but this isn’t explored any further, which is a bit disappointing as Moretz really captures the screen with a haunting presence as she forewarns the audience for what’s to come;

“At the beginning she gave me things, perfect balance, perfect sleep. Now she wants to get inside of me”

That said the opening scene is full of omens and it introduces Dr Josef to the witches dance and ultimately his salvation, and possibly the salvation of mankind depending on how much you read into the film.

Symbolism and violence aside this movie is visually captivating, there are more costume delights than you’d find at a lady Gaga concert. There are hypnotic dream sequences that are nightmarish and subliminal while at the same time ending in orgasm. The witchcraft is captured in the dance sequences and the power the witches summon is not lost on the screen, some of the jumps and movements evoke the presence of demonic spirituality which sends shivers down the spine and leave you thinking about what you’ve just witnessed for days to come.

The final few acts in this movie are spoken about a lot in reviews; obviously it would be unfair to say too much but the finale features a strong theatrical dance performance, which is the soul of what this movie is about. After watching a horror movie that pushes the grotesque to new levels it’s quite hard to adapt to the sudden increase in tempo and it can be difficult to come to terms with what the film is offering.

However Suspiria proves to push beyond the horror genre it’s set in and creates a world with plenty to talk about, enough darkness to make you close your eyes, and enough intrigue to make you want to stay till the end. My advice would be to go see this movie while it’s showing in the cinema but whatever you do, don’t go alone.  

I’ve been a long time waiting but I finally got the Stella cinema experience I’d been dreaming of since hearing about their opening last October. Equipped with novelty beds in the front row, plush leather arm chairs throughout, and couple couches at the back - Stella offers you an evening of entertainment you won’t get anywhere else in Ireland.

I kicked off my evening with some White Russians in the cocktail bar upstairs, the staff were very welcoming and added to the class of a theatre which already overwhelms you with its sophisticated decor and 1920’s refurbishments. The food menu is nicely priced and can be delivered to your seat, I opted for the double cheese burger which left me in good form and change from a tenner.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society was the perfect movie to see in the Stella as the atmosphere of the theatre added to the wartime period story and vice versa.

The film has so many great characters, the quirky singleton Isola Pribby is played by Katherine Parkinson who pulls off a gin drinking Phoebe (friends) type character, although at times I feel like she will mature into Ms Doyle from Fr Ted.

Penelope Wilton is perfectly cast as Amelia Maugery, the matron of the society, who shows a compelling range of emotion from her cold first appearance to war torn tears later on.

The feisty Elizabeth McKenna (Jessica Brown Findlay) is the moral compass of the story, sacrificing her own personal comforts and putting herself at risk in the name of liberty, equality, and potatoe peel pie. Not all heroes wear capes.

The story of course centres around the writer Juliet Ashton (Lily James), who starts out as a bit of a love struck book worm but grows in strength and character as the film goes on, she’s also rather attractive in a Wallace & Gromit kind of way.

In a nutshell it’s the feminist movie Wonderwoman failed to be, the central characters are all female with the love interests made up by supporting males and the main themes being about female struggle and empowerment.

The love story is simple enough so I’m not going to give anything away, but the plot is quite interesting and is a gentle reveal which harbours enough suspense to keep the movie flowing. The film is also littered with war time shots and some very gripping scenes of life in a nazi occupied territory.

There are some great cinematic moments such as Juliet’s night at the ball, her arrival on the island, Dawsey Adams’ (Michiel Huisman) tumultuous entrance to the book club, and the air force carrier take off on the sandy beach towards the end. To be honest the film is full of little moments which you soak up like a sponge and only realise how individually brilliant and significant they are afterwards.

There are also some incredibly cheesy and theatrical moments such as the engagement but I think these are common from the art of exaggerated storytelling and they help create a sense of identity within the film, after all this is an adaptation from a bestselling novel where the main character pursues the identity of a man from a book club based on a shared love for the works of Charles Lamb.

Although the engagement story is a bit cliché it does add to Juliet’s character development and is central to her successfully finding her true identity and ability to become the writer she wants to be.  

All in all it’s a nicely shot movie with great characters and a family friendly story line that’s worth a watch. 

I like Daisy Ridley as the face of the new star wars trilogy, she’s very proper, reminds me of Keira Knightley but if Keira Knightley did weights and couldn’t act so good, in that sense she reminds me of Arnie, or Sylvester Stallone, or Grace Jones, but what she lacks in delivery she more than makes up with force and perfect elocution.

But brawn acting aside this is the most star wars Star Wars movie to date. It’s an epic, unmissable adventure full of plot twists, space battles and lightsabre clashes.

It continues to borrow closet characters, movie sets, and plot points from the original trilogy, however that does add to the feel of the star wars universe, and I think The Last Jedi has recovered from a lot of the mistakes of its predecessor The Force Awakens. 

One example is Kylo Ren removing the mask to mature from bad boy to Sith dark lord with a heart of pure evil. There are moments when shivers will run down your spine at the site of him on screen. The creation of a dark force is a real accomplishment in this instalment, not seen since Anakin went loco at the Jedi kid party in ‘Revenge of The Sith’.

A really odd point is that there are quite a few references to snuffing people out, at first I thought it might be some kind of Nicholas Cage reference but then Carrie Fisher takes a dive in the deep black and the whole cinema is stunned into silence, but just as the dark force awakens so does the light and we learn about a whole new dimension of Jedi abilities and mind tricks.

The expansion of Jedi skills is both creative and entertaining; there are further examples of how the force works and some really great scenes demonstrating the full extent of the new force (the norce) in action. Disney superstar Daisy Rey is very keen to find out about the norce and picks up from where she left off; on a yoga retreat in County Kerry learning about becoming a Jedi in three easy lessons. However after lesson two Daisy Rey faces a crossroads when Chewbacca turns Vegan and she has to make a decision before everyone turns full namaste. Finding the balance between dark and hormones Rey rushes off to fight the First Order by herself resulting in a face-off with the mysterious Supreme Leader Snoke.

Snoke is basically the Emperor, but with the lack of a back story, a larger army, more loyal apprentices, stronger powers, and a much creepier voice, like Snoke is definitely into some weird stuff.

Meanwhile back on prayer island Luke is singing songs to the Star Wars puffins (Porgs) & learning how to become one with the Matrix.

There is a lot happening in this movie and it’s got a finger in a lot of different pies across the universe, there are some preachy lessons about how weapons are sold in mass conflicts, about how egomaniacs make poor decisions, and about how disposable life outside the Empire really is.

The mantra of the movie appears to be ‘out with the old’, a message that Star Wars is evolving for a new generation perhaps, with new characters and new adventures. The revolution has begun and it’s about to get a whole lot bigger with even more inconsequential destruction and mass scale murder that neither makes any sense or makes you feel like there is any purpose to your insignificant existence.  
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All that aside if you want to see Jedi fights and space battles what are you waiting for. May the force be with you.

The year is 2049, there is the real world and the outer world, separated by a wall, presumably built by America and paid for by Mexico. Global warming has not been kind; LA is in the year of winter powered by the perpetually sunny state of California which has been covered in stunning solar panel towers. There is a shortage of crops but we still have cigarettes as tobacco fields are both an important part of American GDP and a great way to make someone look bad ass in the movies.

If this film is in any way a prediction of the future it’s good to know that technology gets way out of hand, also buy Mitsubishi shares now, diversify portfolio with Coca-Cola and sex bots.

On a side note I once read that after Return Of The Jedi, George Lucas held back on making any more Star Wars movies until the technology was right. That might also be fitting of Blade Runner. The film just can’t fail to disappoint, visually it’s stunning, with its vast landscapes, baron city ruins, fallout zones, mega cities, and technological fantasy.

Blade Runner also captures a complex and obscure dystopian future featuring child slavery, android servitude, and a macho world of sexual obscenity not too dissimilar to Duke Nukem’s Land Of The Babes. Technologically there is a lot to take in, from the delights of hover cars to mainstream JOI companionship, in 2049 Joi is a robot hologram who will risk everything in the pursuit of syphilis. One bit of technology that stood out was the 4D TV’s, I mention as Back To The Future also predicted them so I’m thinking it’s only a matter of time folks.

The plot is enjoyable, it neatly works on its predecessor’s mind melt that people can’t guarantee that they're human because memories are implanted faster than the NSA can access your webcam but it adds a twist with Replicants urging to be recognised as equals, and you get the sense that the Replicants are gearing up for a Hunger Games style conflict sooner or later.

The Replicant’s call to war comes with the discovery of a child born of Replicant descent. So basically this is the plot from Orphan Black, a child born from a clone gets hunted down by an evil corporation so that they can do testing on its genetic structure or something.

However unlike Orphan Black there is less logic behind the corporations motivations to recover the child, for instance if they really wanted to produce well behaved drones then reproduction might not be the best way of doing it, on the premise that you have more genetic uncertainties and less control over production and data analysis.  Also it seems as if Mr Wallace has created a technology which has garnered him huge wealth and he's left looking a bit like a one dimensional super villain suffering from a god complex, with very weak motivations and a lack of depth. 

Ms Luv also fails to use the company’s firepower to wipe out K which makes it feel a bit like a weak Bond movie at times because you never feel like he is in critical danger and the one question you come away with is why at any point in this movie wasn’t K killed when he could have been.

The LAPD leader is like the love child of Theresa May and Mariano Rajoy and her motivations to quell rebellion before it kicks off a referendum are a bit easier to understand. This makes the plot a bit more tangible and if the corporations motivations were a bit meatier this film would have a more complete feel about it.

Blade Runner also attempts to raise familiar questions in AI SciFi such as when is an android considered equal to a human, when does AI start to think for itself, can AI feel real emotion and if so does such emotion relate to independent thought. With that in mind, despite the weak plot points, Blade Runner offers total escapism into a bizarre world, worth seeing for the innovative technologies, abstract ideas and stunning landscapes.
 
The cover art for this post is by @JamesJeanArt

If you’re a creationist you may or may not love this movie, depending on how out of touch with reality you actually are. If by chance you’re a semi-recreational believer in a debunked theory that god and the snow elves made Christmas in seven days which means the earth is approximately 6,000 years old then you might enjoy the theological aspects of the movie, along with its exploration of how something can exist where nothing once dwelled. On the other hand if you’re a hard core everyday creationist this might take you over the edge into believing that baby Groot is the second coming of Jesus and Sylvester Stalone is a reincarnated John the Baptist.

I thought I’d just get that out of the way, you have been warned.

Guardians Vol 2 has to be judged by its own merits, and by that I mean it has to rigorously stand up to the standards set by the first, which in my opinion it does quite nicely. It’s a very funny movie with a soundtrack to match the original. The characters are all very unique and if you’re discovering them for the first time you’ll enjoy their Marvel abilities and quirky sense of humour, not too unlike Deadpool if one was to look for a comparison.

There are some awful bits of course, the constant relationship whinging, some implausible action scenes, the annoying storyline in which every character seems to have parenting issues, gold raced space pilots who can’t fly spaceships, and an ending so unbearably cheesy that it made me think the movie was completely ruined, but I projectile vomited and remembered this movie was for the creationists and I shouldn’t judge them for their stupidity.

What this film does very well is open with an action scene, shot from the musical perspective of the Baby Groot, who continues to bring some adorable and hysterical scenes throughout. There are some gritty space deaths, emotional outbursts (not Stalone’s one but other ones), and enough rocket moments to make this an entertaining movie, all in all it stacks up as a great cinema experience with stunning visuals and great characters.  As a marvel space movie it’s worth a watch, even if you are of scientific mind, just ignore the usual ignorance for the laws of gravity and don’t be too concerned about the wholesale alien interbreeding by the universe’s most god like Caucasian male who just wants to bond with his chosen son, who just so happens to be American, it’s a coincidence, the universe is a big place anything could happen, infinite possibilities, somewhere there could be a universe where the earth is actually no more than 6000 years.....no wait scrap that thought....that’s still irrational.
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I am Groot