Matthew Anderson
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Film Review: City of Tiny Lights
★★★★☆ As with many great film noirs of days gone by, City of Tiny Lights begins with the setting sun. A man’s voice speaks of “the lies people tell, the truths they don’t”, but in the gathering gloom it’s not the broad boulevards of Los Angeles that will be the setting for this murky tale…
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Film Review: The Age of Shadows
★★★★☆ “People shouldn’t live among rats.” So says resistance fighter Jang-ok (Park Hee-soon) at the climax of a blistering, terrifically choreographed prologue in Kim Jee-woon’s mercurial, labyrinthine historical thriller The Age of Shadows. Here is a film where allegiances, ulterior motives and loyalties are as transient and alluring as the moonlight which shimmers on black…
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Film Review: The Olive Tree
★★☆☆☆ Icíar Bollaín’s The Olive Tree is a familial drama whose meandering tone and rather glib message mean that it never truly takes root. Set predominantly in rural Spain, the Madrid-born director’s latest offering is a fable that relates to the importance of heritage, doing right by ones loved ones and how joys, hurt and…
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Film Review: Gleason
★★★★☆ Heroism can take on many forms. A professional athlete, at the peak of his career, may block a punt in the opening seconds of an NFL game and reignite the hopes and aspirations of an entire city, decimated in the wake of one of the worst floods in living memory. Some time later, this…
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Film Review: We Are X
★★☆☆☆ Does playing Madison Square Garden mark the pinnacle of any rock bands live career? Is it at the moment you take to a stage graced by Elvis, Led Zeppelin, The Stones and other greats, that you can say you’ve truly ‘made it’ on a global scale? The hallowed New York arena forms the epicentre…
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Film Review: Logan
★★★★☆ “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” In both the first and final frames of Logan, Hugh Jackman’s muscled, hirsute Wolverine wakes not alongside a beautiful woman nor at a school for mutants, but from a fitful sleep on the floor of a car. All glory, fame and pride are long gone…
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Film Review: Patriots Day
★★★☆☆ It’s some time since any degree of positivity has come out of a bitterly divided, and divisive, US of A. Peter Berg’s Patriots Day – a vivid, evocative and unflinching retelling of the April 2013 Boston marathon bombings and their immediate aftermath – is both a fitting tribute and respectful commemoration of those killed…
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Film Review: The Fits
★★★★☆ Just a week after Moonlight graced UK cinema screens in all its feverish beauty we’re treated to another hard-hitting US indie release that places black characters front and centre. However, though there are certainly parallels to be drawn between Barry Jenkins’ Oscar hopeful and Anna Rose Holmer’s narrative debut The Fits, neither should be…
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Film Review: Lost in France
★★★☆☆ Documentary filmmaker Niall McCann’s Lost in France is a nostalgic trip down memory lane for a group of mid-1990s bands and musicians borne from the influential Glasgow record label Chemikal Underground. Both an ode to the industrial Scottish city from which they hail and a lament on the changing face and decline of musical…
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Film Review: Toni Erdmann
★★★★☆ Given the times in which we live, making jokes about mail bombs to a postman could be seen as rather a poor show. Equally, telling your elderly mother you’ve taken on a new job moonlighting at an old people’s home, scaring residents to death (literally) for €50 a pop is borderline immoral. But such…