Matthew Anderson
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Film Review: ‘Paper Planes’
★★★☆☆ In the underdog story that was Dodgeball (2004), the teams of Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller went head-to-head in Las Vegas, the spectacle broadcast around the world on ESPN8. Another almost-sport worthy of ‘The Ocho’ would be the World Paper Plane Championships, which is sponsored, as fate would have it, by Red Bull. Australian…
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Film Review: ‘The Program’
★★★☆☆ Standing in front of a mirror, a man repeats the phrase, “I have never tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.” His intonation and inflection changes but his eyes remain piercing, emotionless and glacially cold. Pauses for effect are added, differing facial expressions are selected, each one conveying a slightly altered emotion, as if picking a…
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Film Review: My Golden Days
★★★★☆ Arnaud Desplechin’s My Golden Days follows Paul Dédalus (Quentin Dolmaire) on a path through adolescence into adulthood, as told by his older self (Mathieu Amalric). Paul is beaten up for sticking to his guns on a number of occasions. Bloodied, bruised and patched up by siblings Ivan (Raphael Cohen) and Delphine (Lily Taieb), he…
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London 2015: ‘Ayanda’ review
★★★☆☆ Blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, South African director Sara Blecher’s Ayanda (2015) is, on the one hand, an energetic and intimate tale of one woman’s plight to save her family garage business. This personal thread serves as the cornerstone of a broader portrait of the whole continent by fictional photojournalist ‘The Expressionist’…
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DVD Review: ‘Beyond the Reach’
★★☆☆☆ The division between deranged villainy and complete buffoonery is a fine one. As bloodthirsty, silver-tongued businessman John Madec in French director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti’s Beyond the Reach (2014), Michael Douglas tramples all over the line drawn in the Mojave desert sand as a maniacal caricature of Gordon Gekko toting a high-calibre Austrian rifle. Based on…
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London 2015: ‘Hitchcock Truffaut’ review
★★★☆☆ Kent Jones – Director of Programming for the New York Film Festival – along with French critic and historian Serge Toubiana, have extrapolated segments of the now gospel book Hitchcock/Truffaut and combined its insights with talking head interviews of their own, exploring the influence its pages have had on countless filmmakers since publication in…
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London 2015: ‘Being Evel’ review
★★★★☆ Pop culture has forever promoted the image of a white knight riding into town on horseback as part of the American psyche. In the late 1960s – with President Nixon up to no good, the Vietnam War taking its toll and the Civil Rights Moment dividing a nation – a much-needed hero zoomed across…
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Film Review: ‘Zarafa’
★★☆☆☆ Kicking off an animated children’s film with a pair of terrified young slaves bound in chains being intimidated by a vicious mutt is unconventional to say the least. However, this is the departure point chosen by the directorial pairing of Rémi Bezançon and Jean-Christophe Lie whose new film, Zarafa (2012), takes as its inspiration…
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Film Review: ‘The Walk’
★★★☆☆ New Yorkers staring skywards from below the World Trade Center, struck by a sense of terror and confusion, evokes dark memories of the not too distant past. However, in The Walk (2015), the latest film from Robert Zemeckis, the onlookers’ bewildered emotions are mingled with admiration, awe and sheer disbelief. This is due to…
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Film Review: ‘Unbreakable’
★★★★☆ As much as writers and film critics in particular like to pronounce upon storytelling and the experiences of others, some tales are so miraculous and awe-inspiring that any words will completely fail them. The expression ‘triumph over adversity’ is used altogether too frequently nowadays to describe all manner of things – such as a…