Neil Jordan
62 connections found
Filmography
The Crying Game 1992 
Mona Lisa 1986 
Breakfast on Pluto 2005 
The Brave One 2007 
The End of the Affair 1999 
In Dreams 1999 
Byzantium 2013 
Michael Collins 1996 
Interview with the Vampire 1994 
The Company of Wolves 1984 
Ondine 2010 
We're No Angels 1989 
The Good Thief 2003 
High Spirits 1988 
The Butcher Boy 1998 View:
Connections, in both directions
Red Riding Hood (2011)
Directed by Catherine Hardwicke
influenced by The Company of Wolves (1984)
Themes Plot
If she had been smart enough and sly enough she could have created an adult fairy tale along the lines of Neil Jordan's "The Company of Wolves."
(For the quintessential film treatment of the story, see Neil Jordan’s 1984 film The Company of Wolves, which is based on the short story by Angela Carter.)
Seyfried and Fernandez enjoy a few stolen kisses and a chaste roll in the hay, but the film never tries to plumb its source's psychosexual depths in the manner of, say, Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves" (filmed by Neil Jordan in 1984).
The second horror movie inspired by the Little Red Riding Hood tale (the first was 1984's "The Company of Wolves," directed by Neil Jordan), the new movie takes place in a deliberately artificial, almost Rankin/Bass-looking medieval village called Daggerhorn -- a doubly phallocentric name that ought to sound a warning to any young maiden.
The film you’re looking for is probably 1984’s certifiably crazy “The Company of Wolves,’’ with its Freudian psychology, icky transformation scenes, and Angela Lansbury as a malevolent granny warning Little Red to “never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle.’’
Like many a classic fairytale, the Red Riding Hood story has been much revised and revisited over the years, perhaps most notably by the late British author Angela Carter, whose 1979 short story collection The Bloody Chamber (the basis for Neil Jordan’s 1984 The Company of Wolves) offered three distinctive variations, including one in which little Red cuddled up with the Big Bad Wolf himself—and in Granny’s bed no less!
The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)
Directed by John Sayles
influenced Ondine (2010), Byzantium (2013)
Themes Characters Plot
Like John Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish, Jordan's movie plays with the Celtic myth of the selkie - a seal that can shed her skin and transform into a human.
Like John Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish, Neil Jordan's intoxicatingly beautiful Ondine plays off the marvelous folklore of the selkie, a seal who sheds his or her skin temporarily and can live on land as a human.
A hybrid creature well known to fans of John Sayles' lovely 1994 movie The Secret of Roan Inish, the selkie sheds her seal coat to venture ashore.
Take a dash of Splash, a generous pinch of The Secret of Roan Inish, and a healthy portion of low-key and very effective Irish charm, and the result is Ondine , a sweet and frankly lovely little film from Neil Jordan .
Half inspired by John Sayles' far superior 1993 film "The Secret of Roan Inish," Jordan sets up a tale about a sheepish Irish fisherman and divorced father named Syracuse (Colin Farrell) who pulls from the sea what he is led to believe is a selkie mermaid named Ondine (Alicja Bachelda).
No, not a mermaid exactly, but perhaps a selkie, one of the seal-women of local legend and John Sayles’s 1994 “The Secret of Roan Inish,’’ whose grounded whimsy this film shares.
And if nothing else, you can spend its running time recalling better movies it seems to pay tribute to — Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Mona Lisa, The Professional, Oldboy, Drive.
At its best, You Were Never Really Here reminded me of one of the most underrated films of the 1980s, Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa—only without peak Bob Hoskins or Michael Caine or anything more than the rudiments of a plot.
The “romanticization” of the vampire has been evolving since (at least) John Badham’s 1979 rendition of Dracula — but we never saw our beloved cinematic bloodsuckers lose their teeth like they did in the feckless Twilight movies.
But the film ends up such a muddled clot of plotlines and tones that it leaves you famished for the exuberance of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula adaptation, or the expressionistic kink of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, or the marrow-freezing solitude of Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In – or even the good, honest gloominess of a Twilight .
But Neil “Interview with the Vampire/The Crying Game” Jordan still manages to return this sort of tale to the realm of adults, with the meaty themes and grim, gory violence that “Twilight” scrubbed out.
The Irish actress now stars in the Ireland-set “Byzantium,” which at times feels like a knockoff of Meyer’s “Twilight.”
But don’t let that scare you -- Byzantium is a cerebral, British indie film, too ruminative and atmospheric to be lumped in with the likes of the Twilight series.
It's difficult to imagine that the vampire film could have anything new to say in these fang-xhausted post-Twilight days.
Nosferatu (1922)
Directed by F. W. Murnau
influenced Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Themes Visuals
I love vampire flicks, going all the way to the silent "Nosferatu" through Lugosi and Lee to "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and "The Lost Boys."
Director Neil Jordan ( The Crying Game ) imbues several scenes with eerie poetry that honors such great movie fantasists as Jean Cocteau and Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau, and these touches look good on video — this shadowy movie has been sensitively transferred to the small screen.
But the first great vampire movie, " Nosferatu " (1922), knew better, and so does this one.
It infects the folklore, the story of the crags and the heather, the looming, low skies pregnant with what Michael Almereyda's criminally-underestimated (and long forgotten) The Eternal fashioned into a creation story involving unimaginable losses and the sweet, bitter tears they inspire.
Simply put, the story idea has been run into the ground and without a sufficient subplot to support the proceedings (think of the dual stories in "The Silence of the Lambs"), the film quickly sinks as the story plummets into further -- and progressively less frightening -- silliness.
After 1991's "The Silence of the Lambs" took audiences by storm and won five Academy Awards in the process, a blitz of serial killer thrillers became the latest trend.
WITH ECHOES OF "THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS," "NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET" AND "PSYCHO," NEIL JORDAN'S OFTEN CAPTIVATING "IN DREAMS" IS LESS THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS.
From the completely faultless masterpiece that is “The Silence of the Lambs”, through the dark twisting imagery of “Seven”, to the slick writing and performances in “Copycat”, for the most part these have been immensley enjoyable and watchable films.
Downey Jr. doesn't manage the chilling bizarreness of Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter in "The Silence of the Lambs," which this movie resembles in its pedigreed cast and psycho-killer territory.
It's better than most of them, but doesn't reach the depth of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) or the style of Seven (1995).
Garland’s trademark opacity as writer-director is at its peak in Men , but the back half certainly delivers on visceral body horror – one sequence simultaneously evokes both Takashi Miike’s Gozu and Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves .
Let the Right One In (2008)
Directed by Tomas Alfredson
influenced Byzantium (2013), The Crying Game (1992)
Themes Plot
With a magnetic performance from Saoirse Ronan , a surprisingly excellent performance from Gemma Arterton , and a deliciously peculiar spin on familiar lore, " Byzantium " is a refreshing take on vampires and the most stimulating film on the subject since Park Chan-wook 's " Thirst " and Tomas Alfredson 's " Let the Right One In ."
There are vampire tale tropes — they must be “invited” into houses where they carry out their feeding — and easy comparisons to earlier recent stories in this genre, particularly “Let the Right One In.”
After the masterful Swedish and American adaptations of John Adjvide Lindquist's novel " Let the Right One In ," it's a surprise how well "Byzantium" treads on their turf and extends it even further into the world of grownups.
Culminating with a literal waterfall of blood, Byzantium is one of the most interesting and elegant vampire stories we've seen in the last decade, comfortably joining Let The Right One In , Trouble Every Day , and Thirst as strange and invaluable entries in an pleasingly immortal genre.
The best thing in the movie is Arterton's sultry, claw-baring turn, but mostly it's a rudderless riff on Let the Right One In.
One might rush to compare its teenage romance subplot to Twilight, but in truth, the film is closer in its revisionist spirit to Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In .
Drive (2011)
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
influenced by Mona Lisa (1986), The Crying Game (1992)
Themes
Among its many resonances, Drive reminded me of Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa, another tale of a driver teetering between innocence and cruelty; of Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West, with their nameless, laconic protagonists and meticulous buildups to spasms of sudden violence; of the original 1971 Get Carter and its intoxicating pitilessness; of Halloween in its use of—well, you'll see.
Which was told to brilliant effect in Orson Welles ' " Mr. Arkadin ," then to telling effect in Neil Jordan 's " The Crying Game ," and third time the director's trying way too hard.
Notwithstanding the deliriously swoony depictions of the rocky temple from which bats flutter and rise in helix-like synchronicity and rivers of blood flow in perfectly choreographed response to the abstract birth of the vampire, Jordan's depiction of how Clara was made a whore before she was reborn a bloodsucker isn't quite so audacious, less Ken Russell's The Devils than drab Masterpiece Theater.
The working-class Irish accents, grubby aesthetic, and surreal, dreamlike interludes inevitably recall Neil Jordan's early work, but In Bruges resembles films like The Crying Game for larger reasons: When it's funny, it's hilarious; when it's serious, it's powerful; and either way, it's an endless pleasant surprise.
Belfast (2021)
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
influenced by The Butcher Boy (1998), The Crying Game (1992)
Themes
Branagh is competing here with some heavy hitters even in relatively recent years — say, Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy (1997) or Alan Parker’s Angela’s Ashes (1999).
It’s a coming-of-age story, lush and poetic, and has more in common with movies like Truffaut’s 400 Blows than it does with Cal, or The Crying Game.
There have been many good films regarding the “troubles” — from “The Crying Game” to “Cal” and the unfortunately overlooked “’71” (with a then-unknown Barry Keoghan, who’s now one of the “Eternals”) — but “Belfast” is unique in its point of view.
THE GREEN KNIGHT may put fantasy film buffs in mind of John Boorman’s EXCALIBUR or even Neil Jordan’s THE COMPANY OF WOLVES.
One arcane mission after another shifts the tale not only away from the already phantasmagoric qualities of medieval pictures like “Ladyhawke” or “Legend” (or the mythical interpretations of something like “The Company of Wolves”) but also into the sci-fi realms of “Zardoz” or “Annihilation.”
Both John Sayles’ “The Secret of Roan Inish” and Neil Jordan’s “Ondine” did so as well.)
The Neal Jordan fable “Ondine,” starring Colin Farrell, was inspired by the same myth.
Maybe you’ve caught screen interpretations, like John Sayles’s “The Secret of Roan Inish” (1994) or Neil Jordan’s “Ondine” (2009).
Suite du cycle Vampires de la Cinematek, qui nous propose un saut dans le temps ; du classicisme gothique du Dracula de 1931 (Tod Browning) au romantisme décadent d’Entretien avec un vampire.
At one point, the two are shown sitting on a bench in front of Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa,” as Napoleon exclaims, “It is me!”
The film was shot by Christopher Doyle ("In the Mood for Love," "Paranoid Park") in a semi-straightforward manner that nonetheless has an underlying sense of magic, accentuated by original music from Sigur Rós keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, both of which recall "Local Hero" yet achieve their own tone.
The movie jumps the selkie completely in the final act, which culminates in a climax marred by muddy visuals (it's hard to believe these scenes were lensed by noted cinematographer Christopher Doyle, the man behind the lush images in Zhang Yimou's Hero and Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love) and contrived plot points.
Shot by the spectacular Christopher Doyle ( In the Mood for Love , The White Countess ), Ondine is one of the most beautiful films of the year.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
Directed by Edgar Wright
influenced by Mona Lisa (1986)
Characters
That’s because Winstead’s performance–never laughing and delivering a smile like the “Mona Lisa”–is akin to Zooey Deschanel’s character in just about anything she’s done but especially in “(500) Days of Summer.”
Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
influenced by The Company of Wolves (1984)
Themes
Its closest relative is Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, though del Toro avoids the confounding pretension of that earlier work in favor of his own mordant witticism.