Matthew Anderson
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Film Review: Southside with You
★★★☆☆ Southside with You is the film equivalent of a comfortable pair of familiar shoes, the feeling of sitting down into a cosy chair, or the first sip of a cup of tea – it’s ‘nice’. That is to damn with rather faint praise. This may not be one for the ages, but there is…
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Film Review: Free State of Jones
★★★☆☆ Much has been made of the prominence of a ‘white saviour’ in biographical historical epic Free State of Jones. Is this a film about slavery? Yes. Is it led by a white character? Yes. But to limit the field of vision and intent of director Gary Ross’ latest feature negates other aspects of a…
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Film Review: Amanda Knox
★★★☆☆ “Either I’m a psychopath in sheep’s clothing, or I am you.” Delivered by the principal subject of Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn’s Netflix Original documentary, the chilling ambiguity of this opening gambit is the knife-edge course taken to ascertain the truth of Meredith Kercher’s 2007 murder and a shambolic eight-year legal process. Amanda Knox,…
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Interview: Rachel Lang, dir. Baden Baden
Strasbourg native Rachel Lang makes her feature debut with Baden Baden, a Franco-Belgian co-production that takes place in the director’s Alsatian borderlands hometown. A quest for meaning and sense of self as well as place, it is a beguiling, intriguing journey, confounding expectation at each meandering turn. The young French filmmaker sat down with CineVue’s…
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Film Review: De Palma
★★★★☆ It is both continually amusing and rather unexpected that the most offensive exclamation uttered by a director famed for gun battles, bloody violence and pushing the barriers of visual storytelling is “Holy mackerel!” De Palma is an illuminating, engrossing and reverent documentary from fellow filmmakers Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow that benefits from mild…
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DVD Review: The Commitments
★★★★☆ “Soul grabs you by the balls and lifts you above the shite.” Ne’er was a truer word spoken. Undoubtedly one of the greatest music films of all time, The Commitments marks its 25th anniversary this year with a home entertainment re-release bursting with the vibrancy, heart, humour and charm of Alan Parker’s 1991 feature.…
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Film Review: The Infiltrator
★★★☆☆ The Infiltrator does exactly what is says on the tin. This Bryan Cranston-led real life crime drama, telling of a lengthy undercover sting operation to ensnare Pablo Escobar’s mid-80s Florida drug operations, may not reach the blood-splattered heights of The Departed or Donnie Brasco but like director Brad Furman’s former project, The Lincoln Lawyer,…
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Film Review: Hunt for the Wilderpeople
★★★☆☆ ‘Magestical’ isn’t necessarily a real word but it perfectly sums up Kiwi director Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Invented by Sam Neill’s gruff, illiterate grouch of an old codger, Hector, to describe a breathtaking mountaintop vista above New Zealand’s wilderness, in the company of hip-hop loving, fast-talking and lovable troublemaker Ricky Baker (Julian…
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Film Review: Captain Fantastic
★★★☆☆ Living out in the woods, cabin schooling your children and strict SAS-style survival regimes constitute an unorthodox existence. But with its championing of independent thought, outside the box parenting and fervent anti-establishment ethos Captain Fantastic may just convince you it’s a worthwhile idea. More Fantastic Mr. Fox than Captain America, it is a quirky,…
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Film Review: The Blue Room
★★★★☆ Set in a provincial town in the great rural expanses of western France, there’s a debilitating claustrophobia to Mathieu Amalric’s The Blue Room, a tightly coiled retelling of the 1964 Georges Simenon novel. Surrounded by verdant fields and miles of open road, with seclusion comes isolation, and lashings of heavy rain. It is seduction that…