Matthew Anderson
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Film Review: Mimosas
★★★★☆ Space, time and meaning cascade over one another in bewildering fashion in writer-director Oliver Laxe’s second feature Mimosas. It’s a mesmerising, mercurial film in which an arduous undertaking takes on personal, spiritual significance as well as physical form.The Spanish filmmaker sets this thought-provoking quest of faith and self-affirmation in his now home country of…
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DVD Review: Jacques Becker Restored
★★★★★ Often relegated to the shadow of his friend and mentor Jean Renoir, and never attributed with the same influence as Truffaut, Godard and the other Nouvelle Vague critics-turned-directors, Jacques Becker remains a largely hidden, or at least underappreciated, gem of French cinema. StudioCanal’s stellar four-disc selection shines a welcome light on the versatile, humanist,…
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Film Review: Tom of Finland
★★★☆☆ Artistic expression as means of self-determination and liberation from oppression is explored to poignant effect in Tom of Finland, Dome Karukoski’s biographical feature on the life and pioneering work of homoerotic fetish artist Touko Laaksonen.Arcing from his involvement in World War II, through his development in the 1950s and 60s, and onto the height…
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Film Review: Icarus
★★★★☆ Bryan Fogel’s Icarus is a tale of lies, deception and murder with stakes worthy of its Greek antecedent. Seeking to expose the curse of blood doping in his beloved cycling, the filmmaker hurtles dangerously close to the sun before stumbling upon one of the biggest conspiracies in sporting history.It is a bold, quite extraordinary…
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Film Review: Howards End
★★★☆☆ Howards End makes a gleaming return to cinemas across the UK and remains as crisp and clipped as the perfect diction of its exemplary cast. Thanks to a scintillating 4K restoration, this painterly Merchant-Ivory classic shines ever more brightly on our screens once more.James Ivory’s adaptation of EM Forster’s 1910 novel is a tale…
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Film Review: Scribe
★★☆☆☆ Blending various influences from the likes of The Conversation, Blow Out and perhaps most closely The Lives of Others by German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Scribe is an efficient, albeit underwhelming evocation of these surveillance thriller masterpieces.Though it does not come close to its lofty aspirations, the film – a debut feature by…
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Film Review: City of Ghosts
★★★★★ Documentary filmmaker Matthew Heineman’s City of Ghosts is a humbling, stunning exposé that focuses on the resistance to oppression embodied by the Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently group of pioneering citizen journalists. From 2012 onwards they have punched a hole through ISIS’s ruthless propaganda to tell the world the truth of what occurs behind…
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VOD Review: Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
★★★☆☆ A David and Goliath tale of simultaneously familial and federal proportions, Steve James’ Abacus: Small Enough to Jail exposes the big bad establishment’s attempted scapegoating of an NYC Chinatown community bank at the time of the mortgage loan collapse. Possessed of the same defiant resilience that the Sung family are forced to exhibit when…
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Film Review: A Man Called Ove
★★★★☆ “There was nothing before Sonja, and there is nothing after her.” Crack the cantankerous outer-shell of the boorish pensioner who stands head and shoulders above nuisance neighbours in Hannes Holm’s A Man Called Ove and beneath it lies a man bereft.After the death of his wife, and with his soul and sole purpose of…
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Film Review: All Eyez On Me
★★☆☆☆ For the initiated and uninitiated alike, Benny Boom’s All Eyez On Me will be seen as an opportunity missed. Never putting its larger than life subject under the objective microscope that all good biopics should, it vaults him instead onto a fanboy pedestal in gleaming, unadulterated limelight. It’s quite remarkable that a film dealing…