Matthew Anderson
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Film Review: Swung
★★★☆☆ Even if innocently weighing up the virtues of a vegetable patch, discussing one’s ability, or indeed inability, to grow a carrot when issues are being had in the bedroom department is a thinly disguised euphemism at best. Erectile dysfunction is not something the British male wants to talk about, plain and simple, but talk…
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Film Review: Ice and the Sky
★★★☆☆ It’s testament to an overdue and definitive shift to mainstream debate that a documentary on climate change was chosen to close this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A decade on from the cuddly tale of monogamy and perseverance that was March of the Penguins (2005), Luc Jacquet again returns to the Antarctic. Much like the…
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Film Review: Hector
★★★★☆ Hector, a heartfelt road movie driven by a tremendous performance from Ken Loach regular Peter Mullan, is an assured debut feature from writer-director Jake Gavin. The photojournalist turned filmmaker lovingly constructs the tale of homeless nomad ‘Hec’ who, estranged from his family in Glasgow, has roamed the UK’s highways and byways for nearly fifteen…
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DVD Review: Unbranded
★★★☆☆ Mick Jagger once sang about “wild, wild horses”. In Philip Baribeau’s Unbranded (2015), four young men need be more concerned about being kicked in the head than dragged away as they attempt to tame wild mustangs and ride them the 3,000 miles from Mexico to Canada. Their border to border trail will take them…
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Film Review: ‘The Night Before’
★★☆☆☆ Getting the old band back together, Seth Rogen assembles a number of usual suspects for a stocking full of festive Big Apple debauchery in The Night Before (2015). Director Jonathan Levine worked with Rogen and co-star Joseph-Gordon Levitt in the touchingly sincere 50/50, a bromance amidst a fight against cancer. Offering little more than…
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Film Review: ‘The Lesson’
★★★★☆ The most gifted actors are able to convey all emotion and inner anguish with their eyes alone. It’s through the window to the soul of The Lesson’s (2014) protagonist, Nade, that the directorial pairing of Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov – who also penned the script – tell an age-old allegory of right and…
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Film Review: ‘The Honourable Rebel’
★★☆☆☆ Adapted from the book of the same name, Mike Fraser’s The Honourable Rebel (2015) draws on enough material to make it worthy of a 95 minute biopic. The eventful life and times of the right honourable Elizabeth Montagu – whose family home, Beaulieu Palace House, will be known to many a car enthusiast –…
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Film Review: ‘Bridge of Spies’
★★★★★ Cold War espionage-thriller Bridge of Spies (2015) is ‘inspired by true events’, which allows legendary Hollywood director Steven Spielberg a welcome and well-used degree of artistic license. In an eerily quiet opening sequence a quarter worth far more than 25 cents appears, affixed to the underside of a park bench. Wading through the murky…
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Film Review: ‘Star Men’
★★★☆☆ In Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys (2000), the chisel-jawed actor-director and fellow geriatric pals Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner realise their life’s dream, blasting into space to rescue a falling satellite. Keeping their feet on terra firma and throwing down intergalactic knowledge rather than punches, the Star Men of filmmaker and astronomy…
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Film Review: ‘The Russian Woodpecker’
★★★★★ Chad Gracia’s superb doc The Russian Woodpecker (2015) premièred at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and rode out of town with the Grand Jury Prize. A chilling account of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, it ties together the lead up to this tragic event and subsequent Soviet government cover-up, as well as pointing toward a…