‘71, named after the year in which it is based, is director Yann Demange’s striking début feature, which follows a British soldier left abandoned in the middle of Belfast at the height of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The film is told from the perspective of Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell), a brand new recruit in the British Army, who is sent to Northern Ireland after barely having time to finish his basic training. Cook is clearly not the only soldier out of his depth, as his commander makes the perilous mistake of sending his troops into the middle of a riotous Belfast, without protective gear. When the British Army arrive in the heart of the Republican part of Belfast there is an immediate hostility towards them. An encounter between the British troops and a mob of protesters quickly becomes violent and the resulting skirmish leads to Hook being separated from the rest of the British Army and subsequently trapped behind enemy lines.

Quickly becoming apparent in the opening scenes of the film, Demange is reluctant to let ‘71 become bogged down in the complexity of political context to the conflict. Rather than explore the Republican’s motivations for seeking independence for Northern Ireland, or the Protestants opposing arguments, we are instead thrust straight into the heart of the conflict. This may frustrate political ‘anoraks’, but it gives the film a sense of urgency that propels it forward with a compelling frenetic energy.

After being dropped behind enemy lines, Cook is trapped like a rat in a maze as a group of menacing young IRA soldiers drive around searching for him, as well as a group of British undercover officers, whose true loyalties are ambiguous. As with all great thrillers ‘71 is at times unbearably, painfully tense. This is due to fantastic performances throughout the cast, but especially from Jack’ O’Connell, who is in a terrific run of form at the moment after his mesmerizing performance in Starred Up. The cinematography is also excellent as Tat Radcliffe (who unsurprisingly worked on BBC’s dark and stylish The Shadow Line) gets the maximum amount of drama and suspense out of Belfast’s narrow, dark, cobbled streets; dusty, smoked filled pubs; and imposing apartment blocks. Added to ‘71’s dramatic cinematography is a pulse-pounding soundtrack to ratchet up the tension.

Demange strives to convey those caught within the conflict as ordinary people simply trying to survive. One of the effects of the film in following a single soldier and one who appears seemingly apolitical, is to convey the chaos and the senselessness of the violence on both sides of the conflict. There are some particularly provocative scenes in the film, juxtaposing the speed with which shocking violence can occur, arising out of seemingly ordinary and familiar situations which will undoubtedly stay with the audience. Occasionally, Demanges’ naturalism can come across as a little contrived but this is rare with the director more often than not delicately balancing nuanced performances from his actors with all the thrills that you would expect from a genre film.

With ‘71 Demange has created a distinctive film which is undoubtedly one of the best British thrillers of the year. Whilst the film does have political messages, most notably conveying the chaos of war, as a political film its arguments, whilst truthful, are simplistic. As such, whether or not ‘71 possesses the political weight to be counted among British classics dealing with the Northern Ireland conflict, such as Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, is debatable, but as a piece of genre fiction it is first class.

Originally published on Oct 21, 2014

Celebrating its 5th Anniversary (just like us!), The Toronto Irish Film Festival, established to help promote Irish film within Canada, is exhibiting a unique collection of Independent Irish films over the course of three days.

The Toronto Irish Film Festival runs from Friday March 6-Sunday March 8th for more info visit: http://torontoirishfilmfestival.com/

The Festival opens with Standby, a gentle romantic comedy based in Dublin. It stars Brian Gleeson as Alan, a musician with a passion for skiffle music. Alan is fed up, stuck with a boring job in a tourist office in an airport, being perpetually single and living alone with his father. His life appears to take a turn for the better when he runs into his former fling Alice (Jessica Pare, Mad Men), who is grounded in the city after a delayed flight and needs somewhere to stay. Standby is a charming, naturalistic comedy, and the perfect opening to the festival. (The screening also features a Q&A session with Brian Gleeson) (Screening: Friday, March 6, 2015 at 7pm)

Also showing at TIRFF is the uplifting Good Vibrations, which tells the story of Terri Hooley, a man who, in the midst of the ‘troubles’ in 1970s Northern Ireland, opened the record store ‘Good Vibrations’. Hooley and ‘Good Vibrations’ was hugely influential in establishing the Belfast Punk scene, and the film features great music from punk bands of the era including The Undertones and lesser known bands such as the The Outcasts. It also offers an honest account of life in Belfast during one the most difficult moments in its history. (Screening: Saturday March 7, 2015 at 3pm)

Also based in Belfast in the heart of the conflict in the 1970s is the outstanding ’71 which I raved about back when it was released in the UK. Starring Jack O’Connell, it follows a British solider separated from his unit and left to survive the night in a hostile West Belfast. It’s a fantastic debut from director Yann Demange, one that shouldn’t be missed. Consider this a sneak preview screening too, since it’s showing a week before its theatrical release in Toronto. (Screening: Saturday, March 7, 2015 at 5:30pm)

Finishing off the Saturday evening is Irish Film and Television Award winning comedy Gold, a film which sees Ray (David Wilmot) trying to reconnect with his ex-girlfriend and her daughter (Maisie Williams), now a potential track and field star, who is under the thumb of her controlling PE coach stepfather (James Nesbitt). (Screening: Saturday, March 7, 2015 at 8pm).

The festival finishes on the Sunday with Rebuilding the World Trade Centre, an observational documentary by Belfast artist and filmmaker Marcus Robinson, which chronicles construction on the new World Trade Centre. The film uses a mixture of time lapse photography and interviews with those working on the build, offering insights into this important attempt to rebuild one of New York’s most iconic buildings. (Screening: Sunday, March 8, 2015 at 7pm)

The festival also includes a series of 6 short films highlighting the work of new and upcoming Irish film directors as part of TIRFF 2015 IRISH Shorts Programme. (Screening: Sunday, March 8, 2015 at 4pm)

Unbroken‘s most hard-to-watch, brutal scenes see WWII U.S. Airforce bombadier Louis Zamperini (played by a commanding Jack O’Connell) getting thrashed and beaten to oblivion at the hands of a sadistic Japanese prison sergeant called “The Bird” (Japanese singer Miyavi). Over and over again, we see The Bird torture and ridicule Zamperini, and over and over again we watch the Italian-American soldier endure. About the resilience of one man’s mind, body, and spirit in the face of unending pain and indignity, Angelina Jolie‘s POW prestige piece (“a true story”, according to the film’s intro) is an excruciating watch, but the too neatly-packaged structuring and presentation act as something of a blockade between us and Zamperini’s mind. Never do we feel like we’re experiencing his suffering with him; we’re watching from behind the glass of an exhibit at the Hollywood History museum.

An olympic runner before his stint carpet bombing Japanese bases from the Southern Pacific skies and getting in dogfights with Zero planes, Zamperini was aboard a B-24 along with a handful of comrades when it crashed in the middle of the ocean. He along with remaining survivors Francis “Mac” McNamara (Finn Wittrock) and Alan “Phil” Phillips (Domhnall Gleeson), survived for over a month on a raft, dodging fighter plane fire and hungry sharks. “Mac” didn’t make it past day 33, but Louie (as his friends called him) and “Phil” held out for two more weeks before being apprehended by an enemy naval ship. From the moment Louie stepped foot in the Japanese prison until the end of the war, he was treated like trash, kicked in the stomach, punched in the face from sunup ’til sundown by his fellow American captors (they were forced to by The Bird, as part of one of his sick torture strategies), and subjected to all manner of mental and physical abuse. He weathered the storm like only a hero could, and when the war (and the beatings) ended, he went on to raise a happy family and live to the age of 97. (He died last year of pneumonia.)

Zamperini’s story (told in the autobiography written by Laura Hillenbrand the movie is based on) is as awe-inspiring as any you’ll hear, but Jolie and screenwriters Joel and Ethan Coen (yes, they do write scripts once every blue moon) take a storytelling approach that’s too rudimentary and overly respectful. Unbroken should feel like a horror movie (I can’t imagine a more frightening existence than Zamperini’s time in the prison), but instead feels like a pedestrian, gussied-up biopic. Flashbacks to Zamperini’s youth are so overly poetic sometimes it feels icky. “A moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory,” his brother says to him with perfect diction as he rolls away on a train to go to war.

Cinematographer Roger Deakins (one of the greats) does what he usually does and composes some stunning, immaculate images. What I wonder, though, is if Jolie’s influence caused Deakins to pretty up the movie’s aesthetic a bit too much; some close-up shots of O’Connell, even when he’s being smashed in the face, feel too glossy and borderline-glamorous for the subject matter. Whether this was Jolie’s artistic choice, Deakins’, or both, the beautifully-lit, unadventurous visuals don’t pair well with the crushing misery Zamperini lived in, nor does the moody, melodramatic score.

What the Hollywood, restrained style does speak to very well, though, is Zamperini’s abnormal level of nobility. O’Connell is wonderful, the definition of a leader, a man whose shoulders could hold up a nation. In one of the film’s most advertised scenes, The Bird forces a starving, injured Zamperini to hold up a steel beam above his head, ordering his lackey to kill him if he drops it. Portraying her subject in an overtly Christ-like fashion wasn’t the most palatable choice in my estimation; when O’Connell pushes the beam up to the heavens overhead and roars with primal rage at his tormentor The Bird, the film abandons its anchor in reality and things get uncomfortable. You can’t fault O’Connell, though, as he gives every scene his all, no matter how cringe-worthy the material gets. Miyavi is a perfect heel in his screen debut, exuding an almost sexual delight when punishing his hapless prisoners. There’s a palpable spark between the two young actors and for any scene that’s successful in earning Zamperini sympathy, Miyavi deserves half the credit.

Fans of the terrific cult British teen drama Skins have long suspected that it was only a matter of time before Jack O’Connell rose to star status. Fantastic as many of the young actors of that series were, O’Connell always stood a cut above the rest, elevating even the most contrived material through sheer conviction and passion. The show made it clear that if O’Connell was only given a more mature, nuanced story, he would be an actor to look out for. Thankfully, provided a platform to fully demonstrate the considerable range of his talents, O’Connell ably rises to the occasion in the brutal, riveting prison drama Starred Up.

O’Connell stars as nineteen-year-old Eric Love. We first see Eric being transferred from a youth prison to an adult prison for being “starred up” – or being too high-risk to still be treated as a juvenile offender and thus given an early transfer. He has already been hardened by the time of his arrival. A troubled life has prepared him, to an extent, for his stint in this new prison. He carries himself with the attitude of someone who has already seen it all. But he is also still young, and he only acts like he is smarter and more in control than he actually is.

Yet the system doesn’t faze him – even as it starts to throw right hooks that probably ought to cause him to bide his time and “play by the rules,” as one person describes it. His initial arrival tells us volumes about who Eric is and what he has been through. After going through processing with a bleary look of boredom, his first act upon arrival is to masterfully, efficiently craft a razor-blade shiv. Eric is a veteran of this world, not a newborn babe up for the slaughter.

Director David Mackenzie shoots the film with a keen sense for purely visual storytelling. The majority of pertinent information is provided largely through images, and Mackenzie patiently allows us to slowly grasp the complex order of this world. He trusts that even when we don’t understand specifically what is taking place that we will get the general gist and pick up what we didn’t quite catch later (Mackenzie packs the margins of the narrative with an exceptional amount of detail that he never feels the need to call too much attention towards). This is valuable because the dialogue is thick with heavy, sometimes indecipherable, working-class British accents. Mackenzie aims for immersion, and he shoots the film in a docu-realistic style. Cinematographer Michael McDonough, best known for his work on the similarly understated yet vibrant Winter’s Bone, matches the handheld shots with cinematography that subtly drains the color to emphasize the bleaknesss and realism.

Eric is volatile, looking everywhere for an excuse to lash out. His emotional instability is exacerbated by the presence of his father Neville (Ben Mendelsohn), a prison lifer and the second-in-command of the prison’s drug trade. Neville was absent from Eric’s life growing up, and he has no clue how to act as a father to his child, even as he draws himself closer – initially to stop Eric from disrupting the drug trade and later out of a real but misplaced concern. An alternative father figure for Eric arrives when counselor Oliver Baumer (Rupert Friend) saves him from a harsher sentencing for severely beating up a fellow inmate on his first day. Oliver has Eric join his therapy group, filled with younger inmates, to try to work through his issues. The film’s central struggle centers on the pull-and-tug between Neville and Oliver over Eric. Despite how stereotypical and familiar that conflict and these characters sound on paper, the performances, the writing and the direction invest every moment with a sense of ruthless psychological realism. Oliver may be idealistic but his resolve is brittle and his optimism has its limits.

Starred Up’s script is based on writer Jonathan Asser’s actual experiences volunteering as a counselor for the HM Prison Wandsworth, and Oliver is plainly a stand-in for Asser and his perspective on the prison system. Starred Up may not be a social problem film, but in its piercing, untarnished depiction of the prison system, it becomes a powerful indictment of the institution’s many failings. Asser isn’t just interested in the prisoners and their day-to-day struggles – although that is his primary focus. Rather, he wants to build up the entire ecosystem of this world, including the guards and administrative staff, and how the system fails every person that is part of it. Starred Up makes the compelling argument that incarceration is simply easier than rehabilitation, even if in the long-run the latter would probably be more successful – but it would also be prohibitively time-consuming and less profitable.

Like the television series Orange is the New Black, the film wishes to find the humanity hidden within the institutional structure and spread empathy to the under-examined figures who are stuck there. But that’s where the parallels between these two works end. For one thing, Starred Up is set at a maximum security prison with some of England’s worst criminal offenders. For another, it’s unsparingly unsentimental in its look at the prison system. Perhaps most crucially, it concerns itself with masculinity and the corrosive way it is practiced in the prison system. Traditional masculinity defines the behavior and interactions of every inmate. During therapy, individuals make slights about other members’ mothers and the integrity of their heterosexuality (tellingly, Neville secretly has a relationship with his cellmate that he is desperate to keep under wraps). It constantly threatens to boil over into fighting, or worse. Everyone is posturing: they have appearances and reputations to maintain — ones that matter for the largely career criminal make-up of the prison who have no other options or hopes for control or power beyond these prison walls.

However, for all its cutting social commentary, Starred Up is not only a well-observed psychodrama. It is also an intense thriller. Eric’s arrival shakes up the social order of the prison. This is coupled with his unpredictable behavior. His actions ripple out to effect the whole prison hierarchy. When he runs afoul of the prison’s lucrative drug trade, he puts his life greatly at risk, both from above and within. But Eric welcomes it, needling people to see how far he can push them and jumping to violence as a first response to conflict. Mackenzie ratchets up the tension until it becomes unbearable and destruction feels all but inevitable.

If the way Starred Up is never showy, that owes partly to having a number of big performances that more than make up for the visual sparseness. There are three tremendous performances, from Mendelsohn, Friend, and especially O’Connell. O’Connell is remarkable, matching his co-stars beat-for-beat and occasionally even out-classing them. He has the charisma of a leading man, but he also has the committed rigor of a method actor. It’s at once a huge, explosive performance and also a deeply interior one. O’Connell commands the space around him in ways that actors twice his age have no clue how to do. Notice the way he carries himself. There is a full-bodied physicality to his acting – even just furrowing his brow or shifting his eyes, O’Connell is able to convey a surprising amount of information. Eric exudes restless energy. He knows no other way of life and he has resigned himself to his fate. But there is more than just weariness and barely suppressed rage here. There are hints of genuine fear. He is just a kid somewhere underneath it all. O’Connell shows this layer while also making Eric more formidable than just about every person surrounding him. It’s a fearless, mesmerizing performance. If this doesn’t make O’Connell a star, I’m not sure what will.

Angelina Jolie launches herself into the Oscar race with her latest directorial entree Unbroken. As if perfecting Disney villainess status wasn’t impressive enough, Angie’s efforts behind the camera have been wholly ambitious as she continuously tackles stories of war and inhumane situations.

Unlike her first directorial project, In the Land of Blood and Honey, which was a smaller-scaled war drama set in the Bosnian War, Unbroken is the true story of Olympian runner Louis Zamperini (Jack O’Connell), who was taken prisoner by Japanese forces during World War II. The drama was co-written by the Coen Brothers and co-stars Domhnall Gleeson and Garrett Hedlund. With a Christmas Day release, the film is ripe for hanky-grabbing and Oscar-nabbing.