Matthew Anderson
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Film Review: The Library Suicides
★★★★☆ Twin sisters do it for themselves in Euros Lyn’s outstanding feature debut The Library Suicides. The Welsh filmmaker’s wealth of TV directorial experience from the likes of Broadchurch and Happy Valley are evident in a dark, sordid tale of memory, legacy and grief in which present revelations lurch forward in violent fits and starts…
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Film Review: The Carer
★★☆☆☆ This British-Hungarian co-production may herald as its protagonist an ailing man unsteady on his feet, but The Carer is a rather twee romp that purposefully treads familiar ground with a predictability that will disinterest as many as it comforts. Set in a middle England county bearing a striking resemblance to Midsomer, the low production…
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Interview: Andrew Stanton & Lindsey Collins
The good folks at Pixar have done it again. Extraordinarily, twelve years have passed since Finding Nemo won hearts and minds all over the world and long-awaited sequel Finding Dory is another sure-fire hit for the peerless production studio. Writer-director Andrew Stanton – who was part of the team to get the Toy Story train…
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Film Review: The Fall
★★★★☆ Success and failure are separated by the finest of margins in all competitive sport, nowhere more so than track and field athletics. British filmmaker Daniel Gordon’s enthralling, well-considered and finely-balanced sports doc The Fall takes as its centrifugal starting point an immovable fork in the road. At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics the women’s…
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Film Review: The Commune
★★☆☆☆ “You lose one another in a big house.” Prophetic words from the patriarch at the head of Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune. In the wake of his father’s death, Erik (Ulrich Thomsen) inherits an enormous Copenhagen property and wants to cash in on the million kroner it’s worth. His bored wife, Anna (a…
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DVD Review: Zootropolis
★★★★☆ Zootropolis is an absolute delight from first to last. With the kind of thought-provoking depth as seen in Inside Out, albeit not quite as emotionally stirring, it is packed full of charm, a riveting adventure and a number of valuable lessons for humankind by way of the animal kingdom. It is a triumphant, big-hearted…
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Film Review: Ming of Harlem
★★☆☆☆ Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air could have been a stellar documentary given its subject. Alas, it’s not. The film’s principle voice – and limited success – lies with the eminently watchable, animal-loving Antoine Yates, who, in 2003, was arrested and charged with reckless endangerment for housing a Bengal tiger (Ming)…
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Interview: Athina Rachel Tsangari, dir. Chevalier
Six men, a captain and two chefs on a boat. A competition of points both positive and negative on each and every aspect of their being and conduct. The winner crowned ‘The Best in General’. With Chevalier, Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari exposes the deeply rooted competitiveness of male kind and the unspoken anxieties buried…
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VOD Review: A Patch of Fog
★★★☆☆ During one of A Patch of Fog‘s increasingly sinister exchanges between unhinged cat and desperate mouse, Stephen Graham’s devilishly dubious security guard, Robert, threatens his quarry with disconcerting rhetoric: “Am I a sad little man?” Though voiced by a veritable oddball, the sentiment could equally be applied to his prey, Sandy Duffy, a renowned…
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Film Review: A Poem is a Naked Person
★★★★☆ A Poem is a Naked Person is pretty far out, man. In the very loosest sense of the term a documentary biopic of Oklahoma musician Leon Russell, Les Blank’s long-lost film orbits the hirsute, enigmatic singer-songwriter onstage, in the studio and relaxing at home. However, in eschewing effusive talking heads and hagiography this is…