Matthew Anderson
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DVD Review: Swallows and Amazons
★★★★☆ Going back to basics is never a bad thing. The 2016 blockbuster season has been littered with a procession of woefully incoherent, poorly acted, CGI-dominated offerings whose money-spinning intentions have forgone one essential element of filmmaking: a good story. Those useless scurvy dogs. Mercifully, some still fly the flag for substance over style and…
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Film Review: The Ardennes
★★★☆☆ Blood runs deep in The Ardennes. Here we have a fraternal tale of resentment and revenge which shifts gears from brutalist kitchen sink drama in Antwerp’s bleak, unforgiving suburbs to something of wholly demonic, biblical proportions in latter stages that take place under wintry skies, isolated in the film’s titular forest. Robin Pront’s debut…
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Film Review: Sully
★★★☆☆ 15 January 2009. Disbelieving eyes look skyward from apartments and offices in horror as US Airways flight 1549 careens dangerously close to Manhattan rooftops before pitching into the Hudson River. The key to Sully‘s edge-of-your-seat success – and successful it is – is veteran director Clint Eastwood’s ability to render the well-documented event and astonishing…
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Film Review: Chi-Raq
★★★★☆ From School Daze, Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X onwards, fans of Spike Lee have come to expect a certain well-articulated intelligence and socio-political engagement to the Atlanta-born director’s bold and unflinching brand of cinema. The last decade or so has seen a number of near misses, but with Chi-Raq, Lee once again…
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Film Review: Bleed For This
★★★☆☆ How many times has the line “Give me another shot” been uttered in a boxing movie? What is it about these fiercely stubborn, bloodied and bruised fighters that means they just don’t know when to throw in the towel? Of all the human punching bags witnessed on film over the years, and of the…
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DVD Review: Finding Dory
★★★★☆ Taking a swim down memory lane is a tricky business when you forget things and repeat yourself every few seconds. Finding Dory is as entertaining, soul enriching and bittersweet as any Pixar production to date. Once again striking just the right balance of visual gags, crystalline clear animation, plenty of riotous hijinks both above…
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Interview: Golshifteh Farahani, Paterson
Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani rose to international fame alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott’s 2008 film, Body of Lies. She’s been busy, and constantly on the move, since then though her most memorable role for many cinephiles was the last one in her home country, as Sepideh in Asghar Farhadi’s acclaimed drama,…
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Film Review: A United Kingdom
★★★☆☆ November 2016. A member of the Royal family is forced to defend his chosen partner in the face of an unscrupulous right-wing press, with the suggestion in some commentaries of negative racial undertones. It’s hard to fathom, and deeply galling, that this may still be the case but the theatrical release of Amma Asante’s…
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Film Review: Paterson
★★★★☆ Paterson teaches us that there is beauty to be found in all things. Poetry, meaning and further dimensions to even the most mundane trivialities of everyday existence. In Jim Jarmusch’s latest, which takes place in contemporary New Jersey, Adam Driver plays a bus driver and amateur wordsmith named Paterson. Cyclical, overlapping layers, in narrative,…
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Film Review: Magnus
★★★☆☆ “The Mozart of chess” isn’t the most hip of nicknames but it goes some way to expressing the inexplicable, impossible genius of Magnus Carlsen. The 25-year-old Norwegian Grandmaster is the focus of Benjamin Ree’s Magnus, an intimate documentary that charts his rise to fame and an all-important 2013 World Championship event in Chennai. It…