Matthew Anderson
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Film Review: Speed Sisters
★★★☆☆ The young ladies of Amber Fares’ Speed Sisters are very much doing it for themselves. Tyres squeal, engines roar, rubber bullets are fired and tear gas canisters thrown in a documentary which charts the pioneering activities of the first and only all-female Palestinian motor racing team against the backdrop of a perennial conflict. Hailing…
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Film Review: Mojave
★☆☆☆☆ Pablo Picasso once said that good artists copy but greatest artists steal. Mojave‘s opening moments see noted filmmaker Thomas (Garrett Hedlund) sit in the squared off aspect ratio of an interview. Comparisons are made to Lord Byron and fame from the age of nineteen is bemoaned. Highly pretentious beginnings capture the entirety of writer-director…
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Film Review: Disorder
★★☆☆☆ Belgian studmuffin Matthias Schoenaerts is often called upon to bring charismatic, steely-eyed intensity to tough men who possess a principled, protective interior. Well known from Rust & Bone and The Drop, the actor was a natural choice for French director Alice Winocour’s latest feature, Disorder, in which he plays a troubled soldier on his…
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Film Review: The Club
★★★★★ Behind the closed doors of the house on the hill lie many secrets. Enveloped in heavy fog, perched above a raging sea, the past sins of four men remain shrouded in mystery. In The Club, Pablo Larraín dives headlong into an evil that Catholicism has long attempted to sweep under the carpet. A physical…
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Film Review: Risen
★★★☆☆ From Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Waterworld director Kevin Reynolds, Risen provides an alternative viewpoint on the Resurrection and its aftermath. A film that starts out with earnest intentions ends up falling somewhere between a two-thousand-year-old episode of Silent Witness and an educational video R.E. teachers might play to schoolchildren. That’s not to…
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Film Review: The Pearl Button
★★★★☆ With what could be seen as a companion piece to his 2011 documentary Nostalgia for the Light, Chilean director Patricio Guzmán returns to UK cinema screens this year with The Pearl Button. An astoundingly beautiful visual essay which revels in the stunning scenery of Chilean Patagonia, it morphs into a harrowing depiction of the…
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Film Review: Marguerite
★★★☆☆ There certainly ain’t no business like show business. Or amateur operatics for that matter. Eccentric, philanthropic baroness Marguerite Dumont (Catherine Frot) has dedicated her life to music and performing for an entourage of vacuous, superficially adoring high society friends. The fly in the ointment here, however, is that Marguerite is woefully tone-deaf, delusional in…
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DVD Review: The Beat That My Heart Skipped
★★★★☆ Ostensibly a remake of James Toback’s 1978 film Fingers, The Beat That My Heart Skipped sees an electric Romain Duris fill Harvey Keitel’s boots as livewire musician and borderline crook, Thomas Seyr. The fourth feature from French director Jacques Audiard, it is a vibrant, kinetic depiction of obsession, desire and filial responsibility which freewheels…
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Interview: David Farr
With Susanne Bier bringing his adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Night Watchman to BBC primetime, British screenwriter David Farr has been busy behind the camera himself, crafting his directorial debut The Ones Below. A nightmarish upstairs/downstairs simmering suburban thriller, it is an impressive first outing on the big screen for the vastly experienced theatre…
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Film Review: The Ones Below
★★★☆☆ Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, but what about neighbours? If David Farr’s impressive debut feature The Ones Below is anything to go by, it might be best to avoid them completely. Having previously penned several episodes of Spooks and jointly scripted Joe Wright’s Hanna with Canadian screenwriter Seth Lochhead, the Guildford local tries…