Rory Doherty

On 28 April 1996, in Tasmania, Australia, a lone gunman killed 35 people and wounded another 23. The Port Arthur massacre led to sweeping gun reform across Australia, the effectiveness of which is now questioned by people for and against gun control. The gunman’s motivations are presumed to be a misappropriation of blame for family trauma and, as his lawyer recently claimed, to become notorious. The latter of these reasons would seem a definitive reason as to why a film about his story should...

What’s wrong with you?
Do you notice how often you ask yourself that? Prompted by something not going your way, or another exhaustive comparison to other people, or when you catch yourself not enjoying something that you should. And when you can’t find a way to articulate or diagnose what will make you happier, do you think of your negative emotions as some kind of fault in yourself? That your loneliness, burn-out, or general societal dissatisfaction is due to your inadequacies? Joachim Trier...

Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian director of the Oscar-winning The Great Beauty (2013) and HBO Vatican satire The Young Pope (2016), has made a name for himself as a master of scathing commentary on Italian society. His work is usually vast in scope, featuring a small handful of people perched on a privileged perspective, able to oversee the intricate workings of society that is grand, but in turn, crumbling. His films are authentically revealing — they’re sophistically crafted and thematically ...

With True Things, Harry Wootliff tries to repeat the low-key, introspective nature of her previous film – the Glasgow-set relationship drama Only You – but mismatched performances and a painfully simple emotional arc deaden the intended quiet impact. Kate (Ruth Wilson) lives a mundane life, dreaming of excitement and attention. All her prayers are seemingly answered by the arrival of a nameless ex-con (Tom Burke), who Kate dubs "Blond". His manipulative nature soon becomes apparent, and as Ka...

With the iPhone-shot Tangerine and the pastel poverty drama The Florida Project, Sean Baker has proven a knack for getting dynamic performances out of non-professional and inexperienced actors. Red Rocket centres on porn star Mikey (real life former adult entertainer and Scary Movie franchise actor Simon Rex), who's returning to his impoverished Texan small town to try rebuild his life, and the feverish drama cements Baker’s talent for spinning madness-fuelled stories that make you laugh whil...

One issue with Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical The Souvenir was that Tom Burke’s performance as Anthony, a suave heroin addict, threatened to overshadow the much quieter turn by Honor Swinton Byrne as Julie, a young, privileged film student, as his substance abuse poisoned their love. It’s an issue that’s been remedied with the follow-up, as Hogg delves into what drives Julie as she reels from the loss of her abusive partner and creates a short film as a memorial to him.
Hogg’s precise fr...

To some viewers, the first half of David Lowery’s A Ghost Story will challenge them to stay awake. A couple, in the midst of arranging a move, is torn apart by the untimely death of one of them, known only as C (Casey Affleck). He then returns as a ghost, a figure wearing a white sheet with black eye holes, to haunt his grieving love, M (Rooney Mara). He stands silently to watch her cry, kiss another man, and, yes, eat a whole pie in one sitting.
Long shots are filled with sparse action, and ...

It can be uncomfortable getting close to someone. Some people don’t want others to learn anything about them, and our relationship becomes one of a mutually recognised, sturdy distance. Their emotional barriers and boundaries can be so established, so fortified, that it defines them. We become used to their flat expressions and resistance to intimacy, so that when they start to open up, it seems like a betrayal of the person we’ve come to know. Distance can be comfortable.
Every open person w...

Director Denis Villeneuve with Javier Bardem on the set of Dune by Chiabella James, (c) 2020 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc, All Rights Reserved
Too often in genre filmmaking, the human component is forgotten. When watching big, bombastic films, we’re used to underdeveloped characters crumbling and slipping away entirely under the blockbuster spectacle. This is never a problem with the Hollywood movies of Canadian director Denis Villeneuve.
Before helming the monstrous Dune, Villeneuve’s proj...

All stories operate on two levels. There’s the dramatic level, which concerns if the film is well constructed; how tight is the structure, are the audience engaged and compelled, does it function as a piece of drama? It’s more about narrative function and design than it is about anything thematic or intellectual, which is the second level films operate on, the ideas level. This asks what the film is about; what messages is it transmitting, what is the story’s context, what points is it trying...

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:
How do you set yourself apart from something so iconic?
It’s a question producers Rick Berman and Michael Piller were confronted with in the early ‘90s. 25 years after it first aired, Star Trek wa...

I’m not convinced I love my country. It’s a thought that became cemented in my mind when watching Ben Sharrock’s Limbo. The film centres around a group of asylum seekers stuck on a remote Scottish island in a purgatory-like wait for confirmation of their refugee status. But the opening seconds are enough to convince hesitant viewers this won’t be a dour, difficult watch; Limbo is filled with brilliant humour and rich characters, and Sharrock taps into the absurdity of the displacement experie...

Rory Doherty
Before he directed his Star Wars movies, JJ Abrams brought something a little smaller and more intimate to the screen. But how has Super 8 held up?
JJ Abrams is arguably the quintessential blockbuster filmmaker of our age. His films are flashy, technically imaginative, and filled with likeable, peppy characters. He’s tuned in to what the audience wants and doesn’t want to see out of a story. His idea of narratives as a ‘mystery box’ has come under fire in recent years, but it has...

Features
I admire Don Draper, but I don’t want to be anything like him.
Mad Men debuted on the small screen in the summer of 2007, one month after the finale of The Sopranos, signalling that the high quality of dramatic writing we had seen in David Chase’s mafia epic was not a fluke, but instead the start of a daring, novel and dynamic era in television – what has since been dubbed one of its golden eras.
It’s not hard to see why Mad Men took off the way it did. It both mythologised and lamba...

Being sober in a sea of drunk people is a horrible feeling. The raucous excitement, slurred enthusiasm and general lack of control that partiers have is all the more obnoxious to someone who’s not inebriated themselves. It’s made even more laborious, however, when you are in some way responsible for their wellbeing.
It’s a task that Michael (Charlie Tahan) must face nightly as driver of the ‘drunk bus’, the public transport that loops around the campus of a small college town in Ohio late at ...