Matthew Anderson
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Film Review: War Dogs
★★☆☆☆ Raucous entertainment and early promise inevitably succumbs to drab predictability in Todd Phillips’ War Dogs. Based on the true story of David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), two twentysomething friends who bluffed their way into a multi-million dollar Pentagon contract and were subsequently arrested by the FBI, here we have a…
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Film Review: Julieta
★★★★☆ Few contemporary filmmakers are able to use colour with such painterly, masterful splendour as Pedro Almodóvar. The opening frame of Julieta is a vivid close up of the folds of a scarlet dress, billowing ever so slowly. Visually alluring, their movement resembles that of a heart, rhythmically expanding and contracting. The great Spanish director’s…
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Film Review: Ambulance
★★★★☆ “Allah is sufficient for us and he is our guardian.” Amid the collapsed buildings, mountains of rubble and devastating atrocities seen in Ambulance, Mohamed Jabaly’s first-hand account of the 2014 Israeli bombardment of Gaza City, this refrain is uttered by young and old as a cry of resilience, faith and hope for the future.…
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Interview: Miguel Gomes, dir. Arabian Nights
Following the widespread acclaim of his monochrome 2012 feature Tabu, Miguel Gomes ups the stakes with six-hour three volume epic Arabian Nights. An extraordinarily ambitious and eclectic work, it combines the mythology of Scheherazade’s tales with a critique of the Portuguese government’s program of austerity during the financial crisis. Confused? You may will be. But…
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Feature: Buster Keaton 1917-1923
“This fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show.” So says Buster on a visit to the titular playhouse in a 1921 short where the stony-faced actor-director appears simultaneously as spectator, conductor, performer and musician on a programme with only one name – his own. Revelling in the union of cinematic invention and the inner…
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Film Review: Black
★★★☆☆ The now infamous Brussels municipality of Molenbeek provides the polemical backdrop to Black, a brutal modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet by directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. A place name tragically familiar, the urban area has become synonymous with ISIS and Europe’s struggle with terrorism. There is no allusion to fundamentalism here…
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Film Review: Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words
★★★☆☆ “I am Ingrid. This is my story.” Without any air of superiority these straightforward intentions rather understate the life less ordinary laid bare during Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words. They do reflect, however, the sincere humility and honesty of a subject who is equally as captivating in a biographical documentary charting her own…
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Film Review: The Confession
★★★★☆ For much of The Confession: Living the War on Terror its principle subject, Moazzam Begg – a British man suspected of terrorism, but never convicted of any crime, sits opposite a static camera responding to questions from an unseen interviewer. Smartly dressed, strikingly intelligent, eloquent and articulate, his recollections span twenty-five years of persistent…
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Film Review: Up for Love
★★☆☆☆ Few rationally-thinking females jump out of planes at 10,000 feet with a smooth-talking chap they met only an hour previously. But this is the movies, so men and women are swept up in carefree spontaneity and abandon, ignoring the inherent dangers of a tandem skydive with a complete stranger. It’s this kind of unadulterated…
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Film Review: Sid and Nancy
★★★☆☆ Kicking, screaming, swearing and drunkenly staggering his way to centre stage in pulsing, combative bio-drama Sid and Nancy is one of the punk movement’s most vulgar, deplorable and magnetic shining lights. The Sex Pistols’ so-called bassist, Sid Vicious, was a tortured soul who burned with violent intensity that repelled, frightened, confused and attracted those…