Matthew Anderson
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DVD Review: Son of Saul
★★★★★ It’s hard to find the words to adequately describe the breathtaking magnitude and harrowing brilliance of Son of Saul. More than seventy years have passed since the liberation of the death camps but in that time cinema has struggled to ascertain how the worst atrocities of the Holocaust be portrayed on the big screen.…
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Edinburgh 2016: Ithaca review
★☆☆☆☆ Don’t shoot the messenger. But the word on the wire at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where Meg Ryan’s Ithaca is making its UK premiere, doesn’t bode well for the actor’s directorial debut. Set in the titular city post-Pearl Harbour, it’s the story of a teenage boy who delivers telegrams to the townspeople during America’s…
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Film Review: Becoming Zlatan
★★★★☆ It’s hard to fathom how an Irish left-back could bring the international career of a footballing great to an end but Robbie Brady’s last-gasp winner rang the death knell for Sweden’s talismanic striker Zlatan Ibrahimović. With a forthcoming domestic move to Manchester United reportedly on the cards, the timely release of Fredrik and Magnus…
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Film Review: Adult Life Skills
★★★☆☆ Grief is not uncommon thematic ground for the cinema. Making sense of loss, the void to be filled and one’s individual reaction to bereavement is a tale as old as time. From a wealth of experience in the editing room, writer-director Rachel Tunnard steps behind the camera with debut feature Adult Life Skills. It…
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Edinburgh 2016: Little Men review
★★★★★ Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri are future stars. The titular protagonists of Ira Sachs’ Little Men give extraordinarily mature performances that belie their tender age. They feature in a perceptive, affecting family drama that channels the director’s characteristically graceful, understated and emotionally enrapturing style through a subtly crafted story of class and gentrification in…
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Edinburgh 2016: Trivisa review
★★☆☆☆ Featuring in the World Perspectives strand at Edinburgh, Trivisa is a Hong Kong production that takes place in the borderlands between the island and mainland China during the 1997 British handover. There is the kernel of a very good film here that is stamped into unfathomable nothingness by a trio of directors who all…
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Edinburgh 2016: Diving Into the Unknown review
★★★★★ “My aim is to stay alive, I don’t want to die.” A plainly spoken objective from one subject of Juan Reina’s equally forthright, compelling and utterly breath-taking documentary Diving Into the Unknown, a stellar entry in Edinburgh’s Focus on Finland strand. Being buried alive often tops lists of most feared ways to die but…
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Interview: Lucile Hadžihalilović, dir. Evolution
Filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović, partner of controversial helmer Gaspar Noé, brings her long-awaited second feature to cinema screens this Friday. Evolution is an intriguing, at times unfathomable but constantly mysterious and moody piece which morphs into an unsettling and sinister take on mother-son dynamics and the circle of life. CineVue’s Matt Anderson sat down with the…
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Edinburgh 2016: Ken and Kazu review
★★★☆☆ Ken and Kazu is a slow-to-boil Japanese crime thriller from writer-director Hiroshi Shoji that shows momentary glimpses of genuine promise without ever bubbling over or really gripping a viewer as it should. A feature length debut extension of Shoji’s 2011 short of the same name, the film makes its UK premiere under the World…
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Edinburgh 2016: The Islands and the Whales review
★★★☆☆ Throughout much of The Islands and the Whales the rugged Faroe archipelago, jutting out of the sea with awe-inspiring majesty, is shrouded in low-hanging cloud and grey mist. A film that is jaw- dropping in its visual splendour, the choice to envelope the islands in this blanket of precipitation is a keen move by…
