Matthew Anderson
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DVD Review: Bobby
★★★☆☆ It would take a very hard-hearted soul not to well up a little upon seeing stalwart football commentator Jonathan Pearce recount, with tears in his eyes and half-time orange-sized lump in his throat, the last words he ever exchanged with the late, great Bobby Moore. Fans across the country may have endured half a…
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Film Review: Alice Through the Looking Glass
★★★☆☆ Six years on from Tim Burton’s madcap reinvention of the Carroll children’s tales, Mia Wasikowska reprises her role as the enterprising and inquisitive no-longer-so-young lady in Alice Through The Looking Glass. It’s a feast for the eyes, awash with colour and adventure, and there’s a fair amount of humour and rumination on regret, truth-telling…
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Film Review: Money Monster
★☆☆☆☆ Jodie Foster has done her ongoing directorial career no favours with her latest endeavour, Money Monster. It’s impossible to fathom how and why this embarrassingly predictable, poorly performed, woefully scripted, pedestrian thriller received a standing ovation upon its premiere out-of-competition at Cannes. Rising to applaud purely because Julia Roberts and George Clooney are in the…
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Film Review: The Daughter
★★★★☆ A group of old friends sit around a campfire. The mood is one of jovial recollection and reconnection, but as feather-light embers flit away into the night sky secrets lurk in the darkness that envelops them. A meandering tale into the unknown, of long-buried truths, parenthood and troubled filial relationships, The Daughter is a…
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Film Review: The Trust
★☆☆☆☆ The Trust is billed as a crime thriller-cum-black comedy. Unfortunately, this first outing from the brotherly directorial pairing of Alex and Benjamin Brewer is neither thrilling nor funny on any level. Nicolas Cage and Elijah Wood star as crooked Las Vegas cops turned wannabe robbers in a heist movie which is as stagnantly paced…
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DVD Review: The Big Short
★★★☆☆ The closing credit sequence of Adam McKay’s The Other Guys inexplicably plays out with infographics on ponzi schemes, the immorality of big bank CEOs and just what a naughty boy Bernie Madoff was. In spite of unquestionable comedic wit – from numerous Will Ferrell offerings – it’s hard to see how or why the…
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Film Review: The Silent Storm
★★☆☆☆ Writer-director Corinna McFarlane’s The Silent Storm is anything but silent. Or nuanced. Or subtle. Set on a remote, nondescript island off the coast of Scotland in the late 1940s, it is a raucous, disjointed cacophony of marital disharmony, community disintegration and tyrannical piety. A gifted British cast, comprising Damian Lewis, Andrea Riseborough and the…
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Film Review: Chicken
★★★★☆ In an age of Marvel multiplex hegemony, Chicken – from London-based filmmaker Joe Stephenson – is the kind of low-budget British indie which restores faith in cinema as a means of genuine storytelling with well-rounded, engaging characters. Receiving a glowing endorsement from none other than Sir Ian McKellen, this debut feature needs no further…
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Film Review: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
★★★☆☆ Is it possible, or even a good idea, to make a comedy about the war in Afghanistan? Directorial duo Glenn Ficara and John Requa certainly seem to think so. Partnering up with the ever wonderful Tina Fey and her regular writing collaborator Robert Carlock, the team adapts the memoir of Chicago Tribune reporter Kim…
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Film Review: The Seventh Fire
★★★★☆ “About 1/10 every ten years makes it out of here,” says a father exasperated by his drug-peddling son. The outlook for young members of the White Earth Indian Reservation is crushingly bleak. From the outset of The Seventh Fire, the first feature length documentary from Jack Pettibone Riccobono, it’s bracingly candid in both tone and…