Matthew Anderson
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Film Review: The Red Turtle
★★★★★ The Red Turtle is an animated dream, a transcendent work of beautiful, heart-rending art from Studio Ghibli and Dutch animator Michael Dudok de Wit that features no dialogue but speaks volumes of humanity, an indefatigable spirit and mankind’s inter-relationship with nature.Ostensibly a story of survival, this fusion of sound, image and allegory is bursting…
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Film Review: I Am Not Madame Bovary
★★★☆☆ Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. However, in Xiaogang Feng’s I Am Not Madame Bovary, amid bouts of understandable fury, it’s more an overwhelming sense of aggrieved betrayal that drives Li Xuelian (Bingbing Fan).Left spurned by her husband when a scheme to divorce and then remarry – in order to obtain a…
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Film Review: Whisky Galore
★★☆☆☆ Aside from a brief spell of rationing-enforced drought, torrents of the much fabled ‘water of life’ flow through Gillies MacKinnon’s Whisky Galore. It’s a shame that his latest feature – a remake of the Ealing classic – has none of the life-giving fervour of Scotland’s national drink.A dry and surprisingly dull film, it is…
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Film Review: The Levelling
★★★★☆ Like a fox’s call, discerning whether a human cry is in pain, exultation or fear is not always immediately evident. It is a haunting blend of such noises that first meets our ears in the opening seconds of The Levelling, setting an ambiguous duality of tone for Hope Dickson Leach’s debut.Our through-line is a…
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Film Review: LA 92
★★★☆☆ The essence of Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s LA 92 is that many, many wrongs do not make a right. Branching out as a pulsing artery of Ezra Edelman’s monolithic O.J.: Made in America, this bracing but slightly uneven documentary focuses on the catalysts for the Los Angeles riots of April 1992.Framing events around…
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Film Review: A Moving Image
★★★★☆ Do you dabble in kale? Nina (a wonderful Tanya Fear), the lead protagonist of Shola Amoo’s docudrama A Moving Image, jokingly says she could eat it all day, every day. While chomping down on the unappetising health food, the suggestion of a grimace plays on her face.With the camera of a visual arts project…
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Film Review: Their Finest
★★★★☆ Their Finest is a nostalgic, jolly hockey sticks moving picture. But there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. “Authenticity informed by optimism” is the name of the game for British propaganda productions concerned with the morale of a blitzed public during World War Two. Danish director Lone Scherfig’s film about filmmaking opts for a similar…
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Film Review: Letters from Baghdad
★★☆☆☆ Viewed in its entirety, perhaps the most striking element of Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum’s Letters from Baghdad is a mildly galling sense of history repeating itself. Contemporary Western excursions, military offences and ulterior motives in the Middle East are alluded to in a brief prologue that paves the way for this biographical exploration…
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Film Review: Clash
★★★★☆ Chief in the accomplishments of Mohamed Diab’s hard-hitting sophomore feature Clash is the director’s decision to conduct, and construct to astonishing effect, his entire film from the back of a police van. Perhaps eight foot wide and a dozen paces long, this metal cage is our home for the duration. It, and the people…
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Film Review: Neruda
★★★★☆ If Pablo Larraín’s Jackie was etched as cold, clinical but compassionate newsprint, the tone of the Chilean director’s second recent biographical offering, Neruda, is lavished in the vivid, vibrant flare of an eye-popping storybook. The two films premiered just four months apart – in June and September 2016 – but Neruda has none of…