Sundance Review: Eve Hewson Breaks Out In John Carney’s ‘Flora And Son’
deadline.comWorking at the opposite end of the spectrum to Baz Luhrmann, Ireland’s John Carney seems content to make low-key, localized musicals that are almost custom-sized for Sundance.
True, some fingers were burned when, perhaps emboldened by the slow-burn success of 2007’s Once, he hired a big star (Keira Knightley), filmed in New York, and endured the full horror of a hands-on Harvey Weinstein release for the bigger-budgeted follow-up, Begin Again, in 2013.
After whatever went down on that film, however, he returned to Ireland with a bunch of largely unknown actors for his next and arguably best so far: Sing Street (2016), an underrated romantic comedy about a young man (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) trying to find his identity through his love of music.
The good news about Flora and Son is that it is firmly in the tradition of Sing Street, with edgier humor — unusually dark jokes of the kind that pepper the films of John Michael McDonagh — and a slightly more serious subplot than we’ve seen before, involving Dublin’s underprivileged underclass.
Read more on deadline.com
