Matthew Anderson
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DVD Review: The Clan
★★★★☆ From Argentine director Pablo Trapero, The Clan is the third South American-set drama of the last twelve months to inspect the devastating personal trauma caused by autocratic, prison-like communities. From a remote Chilean coastal village Pablo Larrain’s The Club scythed through a suffocating cloak of hushed-up Catholic church abuse; with less gut-wrenching guile Florian…
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#LFF 2016: Chasing Asylum review
★★★★☆ At the time Chasing Asylum was filmed 2,175 men, women and children, seeking refuge in Australia, were being detained indefinitely in centres on Manus Island – in northern Papua New Guinea – and on Nauru, a remote Pacific Ocean island nation. A further 10,000 were stranded in the Philippines due to an escalation in…
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#LFF 2016: Wild review
★★★☆☆ At its primeval heart, Nicolette Krebitz’s Wild is the story of a lonely girl, Ania (Lilith Stangenberg), and a wolf whom she happens upon while making her daily walk to a dead-end job. A cautious, frightened distance initially held between beauty and beast will be slowly eroded by a magnetic, inexorable fascination, obsession even,…
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Film Review: The Girl on the Train
★★★☆☆ Posters on buses, billboards and papers ponder “What did she see?”. The more pertinent question for much of The Girl on the Train is what its deeply troubled and potentially dangerous protagonist did or did not do. Given the unparallelled success of Paula Hawkins’ bestseller the stakes were high for US director Tate Taylor…
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Film Review: 13th
★★★☆☆ Ava DuVernay’s 13th bites down on the gristly notion of the USA as ‘The Land of the Free’, chews with bitter discomfort and consequently spits it out, unable to swallow. The thudding irony of this long-held mantra is made clear in the opening moments of the Selma director’s latest project with plainly shocking statistics,…
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#LFF 2016: Pyromaniac review
★★★☆☆ Playing in the Thrill section of the 2016 London Film Festival, Pyromaniac is a moody, elemental psychodrama set in an isolated Norwegian village sometime in the late 1960s-early 70s. An increasingly paranoid rural community falls prey to the titular firestarter but this stirring Erik Skjoldbjærg-directed feature, full of teenage angst, yearning and fury, is…
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#LFF 2016: King Cobra review
★★★★☆ Justin Kelly’s King Cobra bravely re-tells the true story of gay porn icon Brent Corrigan (real name Sean Lockhart) and is by no means one for the faint-hearted. The mere mention of the word ‘pornography’ incites, more often than not, a knee-jerk reaction of sneering judgement and condescension but to dismiss this brash, ballsy,…
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#LFF 2016: A Date for Mad Mary review
★★★★☆ What are the things you need to know about Mary? She’s impatient, a bit gobby, angry, confused, passionate and loyal but has a history of rubbing people the wrong way. She’s a firecracker who always speaks her mind. Playing in the First Feature Competition at this year’s London Film Festival, it’s a stellar turn…
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Interview: Brian Oakes, dir. Jim: The James Foley Story
19/08/14: brutal images of photojournalist James Wright Foley, murdered by Mohammed Emwazi, spread like wildfire across the globe, defining a watershed moment in the rise of Isis and their place in a sickened global consciousness. But that did not define the man. Director Brian Oakes paints a deeply moving, intimate portrait of his childhood friend…
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DVD Review: Jim: The James Foley Story
★★★★☆ A life should be never defined by death. Not least one extinguished as a tool for extremist propaganda. In presenting heartrending documentary Jim: The James Foley Story in such an intimate, personal manner, director Brian Oakes seeks to reclaim the existence of his childhood friend from the unspeakably brutal images that filled screens across…