Ronan Doyle is an Irish undergraduate film student and freelance critic, whose work has appeared on Indiewire, FilmLinc, Film Ireland, FRED Film Radio, and otherwhere. When not watching movies, reading about movies, writing about movies, or thinking about movies, he can be found talking about movies on Twitter. He is fuelled by tea and has heard of sleep, but finds the idea frightfully silly.
“We will use crow’s blood instead of chicken blood” is one of the less weird lines casually uttered in the course of Rigor Mortis, a movie as mad as any we’re likely to see this year. There is a suicide scene that becomes a mental montage of otherworldly imagery; there is…
His hand extended out enticingly from the Trust Me poster, no matter the battered state of his face, few could fault you for obliging Clark Gregg. He’s one of those affable independent filmmakers who’s smartly taken the MCU blockbuster bosom as a springboard; here…
It’s the great pleasure of the festival experience to see the unfiltered idealism of movies that may never make it beyond the circuit hand-in-hand with the ironclad assurance of yesteryear’s classics. And just as Structure of Crystal offered an old-school…
“This is one of those evenings when one feels like this contraption here,” begins the aloof auctioneer played by Geoffrey Rush in The Best Offer, “…incomplete”. It’s not only for the fact that he speaks of a reassembled mechanical man that he might just as easily have said “automated”: this new movie from Cinema Paradiso …
The vagaries of festival planning are a thorn in the paw of the dispatcher, who craves a regularity of reportage that just can’t be justified when the stars don’t align. So it is that I take you to the festival’s end in this, merely the second summation of my couple of days in…
It might take a degree in Franco-Romanian relations and theology to take much away from The Crypt, and even then you’d need to be reaching. This tonally temeritous offering from sophomore director Corneliu Gheorghita isn’t half the existential allegory it thinks itself, or even a quarter of the fun. Just on the strength of the imagery that opens the film that’s an almighty…
If Richard Linklater has left only one significant mark on the face of film—and let’s not deceive ourselves—it’s the effective eradication of the May-December romance for a young generation of filmmakers in favour of the 9-5. It’s rarely a month goes by without a new movie taking inspiration from the Before series, a swathe of new Jesses and Celines following—literally…
There aren’t many places on the planet that have more cinematic cachet to boast these days than Transylvania: from its age-old iterations in Dracula films innumerable to its prominent role now in the midst of the Romanian New Wave, the region sat at the feet of the Carpathians this month plays host to the 13th annual Transylvania International Film Festival. Unlucky…
Time and motion: the bare elements of the cinematic image. D.W. Griffith’s formalisation of the grammar of film editing when the medium was yet in its infancy effected an understanding between spectator and screen of the space between, the time and the motion we do not see in the space of a cut: the filmic equivalent, as it were, of reading between the lines. With…
Is it a benefit or a burden to share much with not only last year’s winner, but the one before that too? One can only wonder in the case of Eskil Vogt, whose co-written Oslo, August 31st took home the Transylvania Trophy two years ago, and whose directorial debut, in competition this edition, shares a blind heroine with last year’s Ship of Theseus. Neither seems an…