Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: Tron: Ares, Good Boy, A Want in Her, The Perfect Neighbor

Tron: Ares

(119 mins, 12A) Directed by Joachim Rønning; starring Greta Lee, Jared Leto, Evan Peters

AI has generated a fair amount of negative press recently, but in terms of ruinously bad advertising, there’s little that can match Disney’s ham-fisted latest addition to the Tron franchise, which stars Jared Leto, in full messianic prat mode, as a smouldering, soulful artificial intelligence. Tron: Ares posits the terrifying possibility that AI may not destroy the human race but could just be really sanctimonious and annoying, with its perfect skin tone and chiselled bone structure and prolonged, meaningful eye contact.

Leto plays Ares, an AI super-soldier named, ominously, after the Greek god of war. Ares exists mainly in “the Grid” (an eye-popping, neon-drenched virtual domain), but can be materialised for limited periods in the real world. Two rival tech companies are racing to be the first to find a way to stabilise virtual entities such as Ares in the physical world: Ares’s creator, Dillinger Systems, with its narcissist tech-bro disrupter chief executive Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), and competitor Encom, led by idealistic genius Eve Kim (Greta Lee).

Directed by Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales), Tron: Ares nods to the original Tron (1982) with a nostalgic paean to electro pop (Ares claims to be a fan of Depeche Mode) and a trip back in technological time to the Grid in its creaky early years. Mostly, though, it’s an overbearingly futuristic, entirely synthetic spectacle that should appeal to fans of brightly lit objects moving at speed but will likely disappoint audience members hoping for plot logic or story substance. Fortunately, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score is on hand, in case anyone wonders what it would be like to have music screaming angrily at you, an inch from your face, for two hours.

Good Boy

(73 mins, 15) Directed by Ben Leonberg; starring Indy, Shane Jensen, Arielle Friedman



A star is born. The taut, economical, haunted-house chiller Good Boy rests almost entirely on the back of a first-time actor who delivers one of the most nuanced and expressive performances of the year. It’s particularly impressive, given that Indy, playing himself, is a dog. A winsome Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever with a worried frown, he moves, with his ailing owner Todd (Shane Jensen), to the house in the woods where Todd’s grandfather recently met an unpleasant end. Almost immediately, Indy starts to see the shadows of something sinister in dark corners of empty rooms, to hear the echoes of past canine trauma.

Director and cinematographer Ben Leonberg – Indy’s owner in real life – gets considerable mileage from his pet’s exceptionally mobile ears and eyebrows; the photography, shot low, from a dog’s-eye vantage point, is cleverly framed and murkily atmospheric. The story itself is relatively slim, but the picture manages to be both hair-raising and heartbreaking.

A Want in Her

(81 mins, 15) Directed by Myrid Carten; featuring Myrid Carten, Nuala

Inventive, thrillingly cinematic, emotionally raw and extremely personal, the debut feature documentary from the Irish visual artist Myrid Carten turns a lens on to her own extended family – in particular, her troubled but charismatic mother, Nuala. Much of A Want in Her was shot over an intense, eventful period in which Nuala, in the throes of an alcoholic relapse, went missing for many days. At the same time, Carten’s uncles Kevin and Danny were forced into uncomfortable proximity to each other when Danny moved into an abandoned and derelict caravan parked in the garden of the house that Kevin inherited from his late mother. She was evidently a linchpin for Kevin, Nuala, Danny and their seven other siblings; her death affected them all deeply.

Intimate, largely handheld footage is cut together as a cinematic collage with other material; audio clips of phone messages give context, revealing the continuing crises of Nuala’s addiction, while elsewhere, some of Carten’s video artworks are woven in to the film, as are segments captured on MiniDV tapes shot by Carten as a child. It’s profoundly moving: mother-daughter relations are examined with a clear eye and a fierce love.

The Perfect Neighbor 

(97 mins, 15) Directed by Geeta Gandbhir

The winner of the documentary Best Director prize at Sundance earlier in the year, The Perfect Neighbor is an exceptionally tough watch, both in terms of its subject matter and in the way that it is filmed. Composed mostly from police bodycam footage (sufferers of motion sickness, approach with caution), the film captures the grim escalation of a long-running neighbourhood disagreement in a blue-collar Florida suburb.

On 2 June 2023, the mother-of-four Ajike "AJ" Shantrell Owens, 35, was shot and killed by Susan Lorincz following increasingly heated disputes about Owens’s children playing noisily on the common grassy area near to Lorincz’s home. Director Geeta Gandbhir assembles two years’ worth of footage of police interventions and complaints, plus the aftermath, in which Lorincz attempted to use the state’s controversial “stand your ground” law as a defence.