Will Shak-Penn

It is a sweltering evening that ushers in the second instalment of Solax's We Came This Far. For the uninitiated, Solax is a film club that has showcased gl...

To the untrained eye, the menus of Dublin’s Chinese restaurants offer impressive and sweeping arrays of food. They boast flavours from all areas of Chinese cooking, including, but of course, not limited to Cantonese barbecue, Sichuan spice, or even further afield, into a broader pan-Asian repertoire, with many restaurants also offering sushi, Korean bulgogi, or Japanese katsu curry.But look closer, and there’s often a second menu. Sometimes laminated separately, sometimes just a different set of...

As Pride month is upon us, for his latest review, Will Penn chases Niamh Barry's powerful documentary celebrating trans storm chaser Raychel Tanner.

What does it mean to chase a storm? Niamh Barry's short film Something in the Air, recent winner of the Best Short Film Award at the Manchester Film Festival, is heavy with that question. It, of course, is a literal profession for many in rural America; the story follows Raychel Tanner, a trans storm chaser and environmental advocate, across rural Ok...

The blending of fact and fiction is a tricky walk along a precipitous ridge. Down one side is the distortion of fact for self-aggrandisement and illusion. This is what punks and skaters in their scenes call posers, a serious accusation of simply not being real. Down the other is a bla...