Matthew Anderson
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#LFF 2020: Gold for Dogs review
★★☆☆☆ “Your cock and your words fill me with joy.” Crass to the point of being offensive, these lyrics – from one song of the soundtrack to Gold for Dogs – effectively sum up this deplorable coming-of-age debut feature. Nonsensical and tonally misguided, we travel from France’s Atlantic coast to Paris and back, but go…
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#LFF 2020: Shadow Country review
★★★★☆ Set in a small village on the Czech-Austrian border, and spanning fifteen years pre, during and post-Second World War, Bohdan Sláma’s Shadow Country is a monumental piece of filmmaking. Simultaneously an historical allegory of tremendous scope and a claustrophobic, cautionary tale of collaboration and bloody revenge, it is both epic in scale and intimate…
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#LFF 2020: Time review
★★★★☆ Positing the question of whether the principal objective of incarceration is punishment, rehabilitation or undue persecution, Garrett Bradley’s Time is another vital addition to a growing canon of films to pointedly critique the US legal and prison systems’ unjust treatment of people of colour. If Ava DuVernay’s ground-breaking 2016 film, 13th, provided the macro,…
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Film Review: Kajillionaire
★★★★☆ No one’s parents are perfect. But in Miranda July’s Kajillionaire, Robert (Richard Jenkins) and Theresa (Debra Winger) really push the limit of what any child should have to put up with. Or rather, do without. Stepping back behind the camera for her first feature since 2011’s The Future, the multi-talented writer-director plays the long con in an…
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#LFF 2020: Programme preview
Neither shaken nor stirred by the current climate, and rolling with this year’s seemingly unending string of punches with remarkable aplomb, the 2020 edition of the BFI London Film Festival will be unlike any that have preceded it. The big news is that this year’s terrific selection of the world’s best new films will be made available…
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Film Review: La Haine
★★★★★ It’s a quarter of a century since La Haine‘s original release, its win for Best Director at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival and its stunning worldwide acclaim. Mathieu Kassovitz’s account of police brutality is as ferocious a punch in the stomach as it was twenty-five years ago, and retains every spark of an explosive deconstruction of France’s treatment of…
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Film Review: I’m Thinking of Ending Things
★★★★☆ When one door closes in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, some are locked, others left ajar and one which opens memories long buried in the basement is definitely off limits. Director Charlie Kaufman leads us on a not-so-merry dance across these thresholds, literal and figurative, and into the beguiling, psychological maze of his latest…
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Film Review: Perfumes
★★★☆☆ Reminiscent of the 2011 crowd-pleaser Les Intouchables, Grégory Magne’s Perfumes is a charming, unconventional, odd-couple buddy movie of sorts, which crisscrosses an autumnal France with the highly cultured nose of sourpuss recluse, Anne (Emmanuelle Devos), in search of smelly solutions to her myriad clients’ needs. And though he may be driving, her down-on-his-luck, warm-hearted…
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Film Review: My Rembrandt
★★★★☆ There’s much more to Oeke Hoogendijk’s My Rembrandt than initially meets the eye. Taking a close, curatorial look, not at the life, times and oeuvre of the great painter himself, but of contemporary relationships with his work, her latest documentary explores, to great effect, the motives for possession, obsession and ongoing fascination with the…
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Film Review: The Traitor
★★★☆☆ Is there ever honour in betrayal? If the system to which you swore a blood allegiance no longer upholds its traditional values, should you not speak out against it? The moral ambiguities and questions of legacy, friendship, family and integrity in Marco Bellochio’s The Traitor are the strongest points of an ambitious, punishing addition…