Matthew Anderson
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Film Review: ‘Leading Lady’
★☆☆☆☆ The play within a film that South African director Henk Pretorius builds Leading Lady (2014) towards shows the minutest promise during a laborious rehearsal process. Unfortunately, it is revealed to be a predictably laughable am-dram production in a barn which has the audience of a dozen locals – all familiar to the cast –…
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Film Review: ‘Letters to Max’
★★★☆☆ How to solve a problem like Abkhazia? Or rather, how to send a letter from Paris to a country that has not yet been acknowledged by the French state? Documentary filmmaker Eric Baudelaire again chooses the epistolary form in Letters to Max (2014) after employing a series of email exchanges to structure his first…
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Film Review: ‘Fidelio: Alice’s Journey’
★★★☆☆ The ironic naming of the cargo ship that director Lucie Borleteau uses in Fidelio: Alice’s Journey (2014) comes into view as the ‘Fidelio’ departs the port of Marseille for the first time. Employed as the literal and figurative vessel for the emotional and spiritual odyssey undertaken by the film’s eponymous voyager (Ariane Labed) it…
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DVD Review: ‘Spooks’
★★☆☆☆ In a grey, rainy London, hued blue to add further sombre foreboding, the indomitable Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) finds himself in a familiar position: watching an op go south via screens in a new and improved Thames House, stuck between a rock and a hard place. Bharat Nalluri – who directed half a dozen…
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Film Review: ‘Lessons in Love’
★☆☆☆☆ The warning signs are there even before the opening credits roll. Lessons in Love (2014) – the UK title of Tom Vaughan’s latest – went through two prior iterations for its appearance in Canadian (How To Make Love Like An Englishman) and US (Some Kind of Beautiful) cinemas. Unfortunately, much like giving someone the…
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Toronto 2015: ‘Mississippi Grind’ review
★★☆☆☆ The saying goes that when in a hole you should stop digging. Meandering road movie Mississippi Grind (2015), co-directed by the Half Nelson (2006) and Sugar (2008) duo of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, features two hopeless gamblers on whom the sentiment of this old adage appears to have been entirely lost. The pairing…
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Toronto 2015: ‘Last Cab to Darwin’ review
★★★★☆ If there’s one thing that Australia has in spades it’s miles and miles of open road. Be it tarmacked or dust and dirt, lifelong cab driver, Rex (Michael Caton), covers a fair amount of both driving from Broken Hill, NSW, through Oz’s barren Red Centre, to Darwin at the tip of the Northern Territory.…
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Toronto 2015: ‘The Family Fang’ review
★☆☆☆☆ The Family Fang (2015) is Jason Bateman’s second directorial undertaking. Known predominantly for his work in Arrested Development, feature film comedies and oddball roles in more serious pieces, Bateman proved in this year’s The Gift (a scintillating debut picture by Australian actor Joel Edgerton) that he has a far greater acting range than many…
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Toronto 2015: ‘Office’ review
★★★☆☆ Adapted for the big screen by writer-actor Sylvia Chang from her own play Design For Living, attempting to pigeonhole Johnnie To’s latest effort Office (2015) is a case of multiple square pegs and even more round holes. Classifying the part-musical, part-satire, part-comedy, part-Orwellian tale of consumerism and capitalism would do a disservice to the…
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Toronto 2015: ‘The People vs. Fritz Bauer’ review
★★★☆☆ Given the subject and its original title, Lars Kraume’s The People vs. Fritz Bauer (2015) pits the irascible and implacable attorney general against the West German state, rather than its people, which would be more accurate from both a linguistic and narrative point of view. Cantankerous and belligerent but driven by a burning determination…