AT ETERNITY'S GATE ★★★★☆
Directed by Julian Schnabel. Starring Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Oscar Isaac, Mads Mikkelsen, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Niels Arestrup
There are some of the usual visual correlatives in Schnabel's Vincent Van Gogh biopic – the yellow room has rarely been yellower – but there is much more besides. Here is a film that makes a genuine effort to engage with the artist's mental torments while putting forward fresh (albeit contentious) suggestions about his route to a bloody death. It's an attractive piece of work as well as a thoughtful one. Oscar-nominated Dafoe excels as the painter. 12A cert, IFI, Dublin, 111 min DC
CAPTAIN MARVEL ★★★☆☆
Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Starring Brie Larson, Samuel L Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Djimon Hounsou, Lee Pace, Jude Law, Annette Bening
It's a shame the first episode in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a female protagonist isn't just a little better. Larson does well enough in a role that would better suit an actor less wedded to underplayed naturalism. The 1990s nostalgia is played for laughs. Sadly, an amusing centre is squeezed into a wafer by a silly framing space operetta that tries the patience. 12A, gen release, 123 min DC
DON'T GO ★★☆☆☆
Directed by David Gleeson. Starring Stephen Dorff, Melissa George, Aoibhinn McGinnity, Simon Delaney, Charlotte Bradley, Luke Griffin
Dorff and George play an American couple who – after losing a child – locate to a picturesque part of the Irish west and begin seeing ghosts. Can you tell what it is yet? The film never attains the spooky resonance of Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. The supernatural bits looks like bad Malick translated via Chinese whispers into middle-brow festival fodder. The everyday stuff has a whiff of 1990s peat briquette commercials. Delaney, however, is good as a bluff priest. 15A cert, lim release, 91 min DC
DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE ★★★☆☆
Directed by S Craig Zahler. Starring Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, Tory Kittles, Michael Jai White, Jennifer Carpenter, Laurie Holden, Fred Melamed, Udo Kier, Thomas Kretschmann, Don Johnson
This grindcore cops-and-robbers variation has downtime in the downtime. Forget fast cuts: every Ritalin shot is medium-close, still and hideously coloured with snot green, blaring red, or puked mustard interiors and filters. "Being branded a racist in today's public forum is like being branded a communist in the 1950s," Don Johnson's police sergeant scolds Mel Gibson. The racial politics of Dragged Across Concrete are nothing if not provocative. Arriving after the brilliant Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99, it's hard not to feel a little disappointed by Zahler's third wayward meta-anti-film, even if it does reaffirm the writer-director as the most imaginative creator-of-worlds in the business. 18 cert, gen release, 158 min TB
DUMBO ★★★☆☆
Directed by Tim Burton. Starring Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Eva Green, Alan Arkin, Nico Parker, Finley Hobbins, Roshan Seth
The new Dumbo does hit many of the familiar beats. Had Tim Burton and his team cut Baby Mine they would have deserved any horsewhipping that came their way. But we should be grateful that, unlike the recent Beauty and the Beast, this is not a straight retread of the original. Burton makes good use of his cast: Farrell is sympathetic as a circus all-rounder; Green is glamorous. Unfortunately, Dumbo himself is stranded in the unhappy valley between anthropomorphism and verisimilitude. PG cert, gen release, 112 min DC
GREEN BOOK ★★★☆☆
Directed by Peter Farrelly. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini, Dimiter D Marinov
Farrelly moves from Dumb and Dumber to the quasi-true story of an Italian-American goodfella (Mortensen) who drove an African-American pianist (Ali) about the segregated South in the 1960s. It's not the subtlest film: the racial politics are crude; the two actors lay it on with a trowel; the denouement is shamelessly sentimental. And yet the darn thing works. The gears engage. The motor runs smoothly. The destination is achieved. There are worse things in heaven and earth. 12A cert, gen release, 130 min DC
GRETA ★★★★☆
Directed by Neil Jordan. Starring Isabelle Huppert, Chloë Grace Moretz, Maika Monroe, Colm Feore, Stephen Rea
Frances (Moretz), an earnest young woman who works at a snooty New York restaurant, finds a handbag and immediately sets about returning it to its owner. The bag belongs to an older woman, Greta (Huppert), who invites Frances in for tea at her cosy little home. One upended table later and Frances has a diabolical lady stalker on her tail. The camp carrying on and mostly female cast provide a hyper-meta-commentary on 1990s stalker films of old, particularly the girlishly energised Single White Female, Poison Ivy and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. A compellingly weird fairytale. 15A cert, gen release, 99 min TB
HAPPY AS LAZZARO/LAZZARO FELICE ★★★☆☆
Directed by Alice Rohrwacher. Starring Nicoletta Braschi, Adriano Tardiolo, Sergi López, Alba Rohrwacher, Luca Chikovani
Saintly, tousle-haired youth Lazzaro (Tardiolo) lives in an isolated hamlet where he is generally treated like the village idiot. He represents the bottom rung of an already lowly social class: the people around him are sharecroppers toiling on a tobacco farm run by the tyrannical "Queen of Cigarettes", Marquise Alfonsino de Luna (Braschi). The estate's callow scion Tancredi (Georgian YouTube star Luca Chikovani) ensnares the amiable Lazzaro in a phony kidnapping plot. Those with a low threshold for magic realism will not be amused by Rohrwacher's third narrative feature. Although markedly less wispy than her award-winning The Wonders, Happy as Lazzaro, like its elusive protagonist, is dreamy, lightly comic, and unfailingly nice. 12 cert, Triskel, Cork, 130 min TB
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD ★★★★☆
Directed by Dean DeBlois. Voices of Jay Baruchel, Cate Blanchett, Gerard Butler, America Ferrera, Jonah Hill, Kit Harington, Kristen Wiig, F Murray Abraham
When dragonslayer Grimmel (Abraham) threatens, Hiccup (Baruchel) and the good denizens of Berk have little option but to move their dragon to the possibly mythological realm of the title. The Night Fury- obsessed Grimmel, however, has other plans. The Hidden World introduces a "wild and skittish" Light Fury love interest for Toothless and zips along, punctuated by credible action sequences and gleeful silliness. Sit tight for the emotional finale. PG cert, gen release, 104 min TB
THE LEGO MOVIE 2 ★★★☆☆
Directed by Mike Mitchell. Voices of Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, Tiffany Haddish, Stephanie Beatriz, Charlie Day, Alison Brie, Nick Offerman,Maya Rudolph
"Everything is not awesome," sing the Lego Movie collective at a late, crucial juncture in this serviceable sequel. The fourth Lego movie sees the jolly borough of Bricksburg transformed into the Apocalypseburg and under siege from alien Duplo invaders. It falls to everyman master builder Emmet (Pratt), his far more capable chum Lucy (Banks) and a collective that includes Batman (Will Arnett) to take on the marauders. It lacks the snap and crackle of both its predecessor and The Lego Batman Movie, but there are some good jokes and a winning self-awareness. G cert, gen release, 107 min TB
LITTLE ★★★☆☆
Directed by Tina Gordon. Starring Regina Hall, Marsai Martin, Issa Rae, Justin Hartley, Tone Bell, Rachel Dratch
Yet another entry to the sub-genre of body-swap comedies that sees a grown-up inhabit a child's body (or vice versa). Little works through most of the familiar cliches.. Once again, the protagonist takes an awfully long time to accept the unlikely evidence of her own eyes. But a stunning juvenile performance lifts the film above the pack. Hall is under-used as a bossy CEO, but Martin is just brilliant as the kid she becomes. Messy but fun (and a little transgressive). 12A cert, gen release, 109 min DC
LORO ★★★☆☆
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino. Starring Toni Servillo, Elena Sofia Ricci, Riccardo Scamarcio, Kasia Smutniak, Euridice Axen, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Roberto De Francesco
Sorrentino, the director of Il Divo and The Great Beauty, inevitably gets around to the story of Silvio Berlusconi. It's a film of two interlocking halves: a pimp assembles a harem to ensnare the ex-president; the old man (Servillo) plots a return from near isolation. Oddly, the part that sounds most like a Sorrentino joint – the one revelling in Felliniesque excess – is the less satisfactory. The endless bunga-bunga is exhausting. Servillo's portrayal of a brooding exile is engaging. 18 cert, QFT, Belfast; IFI/Light House, Dublin, 150 min DC
THE MAN WHO WANTED TO FLY ★★★★☆
Directed by Frank Shouldice. Featuring Bobby Coote, Ernie Coote
For 50 years and more, Bobby Coote has dreamed of flying. Shot over five years, this delightful documentary follows the Co Cavan octogenarian on his eventful journey to the clouds But this is not just Bobby's story: His 80-something brother Ernie thinks Bobby is a genius yet believes that flying is best left to the birds. Bobby is helped toward his goal by friends and neighbours and flying experts at Newtownards. Working with cinematographer Dave Perry and a lovable cast of characters, director Shouldice has fashioned both a marvellous feel-good movie and a compelling portrait of life in rural Ireland. 12A cert, IFI/Light House, Dublin, 86 min TB
MID90S ★★★★☆
Directed by Jonah Hill. Starring Sunny Suljic, Lucas Hedges, Na-Kel Smith, Olan Prenatt, Gio Galicia, Ryder McLaughlin, Alexa Demie, Katherine Waterston
Kids hang, get up to no good, and ask wildly inappropriate questions ( "Would you rape your parents if you had to?", "Don't thank me; that's gay") in mid90s, Jonah Hill's promising debut as a writer-director. Stevie (The Killing of a Sacred Deer's Suljic) is a 13-year-old in 1990s LA who falls in with the older, cooler kids he meets at a skate shop. Hill's clever, observational dialogue flags how arbitrary teen social standing can be. For all their chilling, the shifting group dynamics between the charismatic Ray (Smith), the sweary Fuckshit (Prenatt), and Ruben (Galicia) – as filmed by Fourth Grade (McLaughlin) – crackle and seeth. Drugs are taken. Heads are cracked. House parties are low-key wild. Super Nintendo controllers are used inappropriately. 16 cert, gen release, 85 min TB
MISSING LINK ★★★★☆
Directed by Chris Butler. Voices of Hugh Jackman, Zoe Saldana, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, David Walliams, Timothy Olyphant, Matt Lucas, Amrita Acharia, Zach Galifianakis
Daredevil explorere Sir Lionel Frost (Jackman) longs to be recognised for his feats but has, thus far, failed to impress the snoots at the club. When an expedition to photograph the Loch Ness monster goes wrong, Sir Lionel heads westwards in search of Bigfoot. When he finally meets the lonely sasquatch (Galifianakis), he hatches a plan to travel to Shangri-La, where, in theory, the loveable creature can finally be among his own kind. Director Butler, cowriter of Kubo and the Two Strings and codirector of ParaNorman, has fun with British colonialism. A vertiginous sequence on an ice-bridge is as nail-biting than any live action (or CGI) scene you care to mention. There are good jokes, a playful sensibility, and a genuine sense of jeopardy. PG cert, gen release, 94 min TB
OUT OF INNOCENCE ★★★☆☆
Directed by Danny Hiller. Starring Fiona Shaw, Alun Armstrong, Fionnuala Flaherty, Ruth McCabe, Mark Wooding, Esther Randall, Berníe Ní Shúilleabháin
In April 1984, the body of a newborn baby is found dead on a beach near Cahersiveen in Co Kerry. A subsequent criminal investigation focuses on a young woman who lives more than 75km away from where the corpse was discovered. Out of Innocence attempts to make sense of the events around the Kerry Babies case. It's not an easy task. There are occasonal narrative lapses: there's simply no way to convey the treatment of the family – even with changed names – without getting into a tricky legal area. Thus, the family matriarch, played by Shaw, inexplicably nods along to any suggestion, regardless of how ludicrous it might be. The bad old days have seldom looked grimmer. 15A cert, gen release, 110 min TB
PET SEMATARY ★★★★☆*
Directed by Kevin Kölsch, Dennis Widmyer. Starring Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, John Lithgow, Jeté Laurence, Obssa Ahme
Dr Louis Creed (Clarke) and his family, including winsome daughter Elle (Laurence) relocate to a small town in Maine amd into a home that backs onto ancient tribal lands where the barrier between life and death is permeable. The family are soon plagued by horrible visions. And that's before Louis and kindly neighbour (Lithgow) decide that they'd rather not tell Ellie that her beloved cat has been killed on the dangerous Chekovian road out front, opting instead for the titular graveyard that brings animals back as evil shadows of themselves. This superior horror often resembles Mary Lambert's 1989 adaptation, but it has more than a few nasty surprises. 16 cert, gen release, 101 min TB
RED JOAN ★☆☆☆☆
Directed by Trevor Nunn. Starring Judi Dench, Stephen Campbell Moore, Sophie Cookson, Tom Hughes, Ben Miles, Nina Susanna, Tereza Srbova
It takes a quality – not a gift exactly, but a quality – to make something so boring of such a fascinating subject. Adapted from a novel by Jennie Rooney, Red Joan gestures towards the true story of English civil servant and Soviet spy Melita Norwood, arrested in her 80s for passing nuclear secrets to the Russians half a century earlier. Dench tries her admirable best in the framing sequences, but the film is dead as dust at its period core. Quaint. Inert. Confused. 15A cert, lim release, 101 min DC
SHAZAM! ★★★☆☆
Directed by David F Sandberg . Starring Zachary Levi, Mark Strong, Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer, Djimon Hounsou, Grace Fulton, Ian Chen, Jovan Armand
The latest DC romp concerns a teenager (Angel) in overcast Philadelphia who somehow or other gains the ability to transform into an adult superhero with Batman's jaw and a circus strongman's leotard. Feels like a family film from the dying years of the first Bush administration. The jokes have a good-nature roughness to their edges. But Shazam! doesn't seem quite comfortable in its own universe and outstays it welcome some time before the bish-bash ending. 12A cert, gen release, 131 min DC
THE SISTERS BROTHERS ★★★☆☆
Directed by Jacques Audiard. Starring John C Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rebecca Root, Rutger Hauer, Carol Kane
Adapted from Patrick deWitt's novel by Audiard and his screenwriting partner Thomas Bidegain, The Sisters Brothers concerns two fraternal bounty hunters. Eli Sisters (Reilly) and his younger brother Charlie (Phoenix) work for a crime boss known only as the Commodore (Hauer). Their latest assignment is to hunt down a chemist, the Hermann Kermit Warm (Ahmed), a mission that is complicated by a tracker (Gyllenhaal) who has a significant head start. The film is often fun but hovers unconvincingly between tones. – a scene in which Reilly tries tooth powder for the first time could have featured in Holmes and Watson. Still, there's some terrific back and forth between Reilly and Phoenix. 15A cert, gen release, 122 min TB
US ★★★★☆
Directed by Jordan Peele. Starring Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Anna Diop, Evan Alex, Shahadi Wright-Joseph
Peele follows up the era-defining Get Out with a horror film about an African-American family meeting their doubles while on holiday. Us follows in a grand tradition of Doppelgänger horrors that stretches back to The Student of Prague more than 100 years ago. Michael Abels's choral jabs increase the unease. Mike Gioulakis's camera risks impenetrable levels of darkness. Nyong'o is stunning in twin roles. But the film does lack its predecessor's satirical punch. 16 cert, gen release, 116 min DC
THE WHITE CROW ★★★★☆
Directed by Ralph Fiennes. Starring Oleg Ivanko, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Chulpan Khamatova, Ralph Fiennes
A young Rudolf Nureyev stares at The Raft of the Medusa byThéodore Géricault, picking out meaningful details. His swooning appreciation is matched by The White Crow's appreciation of its subject, a metatextual case of Stendhal Syndrome. The White Crow recounts the confusion around Nureyev's defection to the West in 1961, a snap, characteristically impetuous decision that had more to do with squabbling than politics. It moves between Nureyev's provincial childhood in Ufa, his education in Leningrad, and his feted performances in Paris with the Kirov Ballet. Ukrainian soloist Ivenko, in his first acting role, is hardly a ringer for Nureyev, but he has the comportment, the eyelashes, the attitude, and Mike Eley's camera understandably loves him. Fiennes's circumspect turn is matched by his considered direction. 15A cert, IFI, Dublin, 127min TB
WILD ROSE ★★★★☆
Directed by Tom Harper. Starring Jessie Buckley, Julie Walters, Sophie Okonedo, Jamie Sives, Ashley Shelton, James Harkness, Gemma McElhinney, Daniel Campbell
Kerry's own Jessie Buckley plays a Glaswegian ex-con who dreams of making it to Nashville. Some films build themselves so determinedly around a central performance that you can't imagine them existing without their star. Buckley triumphs in all areas: she can do comedy; she can do sass; she can sing. She and a fine supporting cast are so strong that the film's missteps (an awkward subplot involving posh Okonedo, a silly celebrity cameo) are easily overlooked. A literal crowd-pleaser. It will greatly please crowds. 15A cert, gen release, 100 min DC
WONDER PARK ★★☆☆☆
Directed by Dylan Brown. Voices of Brianna Denski, Jennifer Garner, Matthew Broderick, John Oliver, Mila Kunis, Kenan Thompson, Ken Jeong
June (voiced by Denski), is a creative eight-year-old who makes a miniature amusement park from bendy straws alongside her doting mother (Garner) and a treasured stuffed monkey toy named Peanut. Wonder Park, as the imaginary fairground is called, is staffed by a narcoleptic bear, naughty beavers, and a sassy warthog (Kunis). When June's mother announces that she is sick, the distraught little girl bins Wonder Park and fusses over with her bumbling dad (Broderick). She is sent to math camp, only to run away from an appallingly supervised school bus and into into the forest where – hang on a minute – she wanders into the real Wonder Land now beset by darkness and chimpanzombies. Huh? PG cert, gen release, 85 min TB
