Matthew Anderson

★★★☆☆ Finding Ben Whishaw at his most electric and engrossing best, Surge sees an airport security official a long way past the end of his rope and on a collision course with disaster. Aneil Karia’s debut feature is (intentionally) uncomfortable viewing from first to last, reminiscent in its apparent aims and mood as the Safdie…

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★★★★☆ Having charmed audiences at Sundance over a year ago, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari finally makes its way to UK screens. Drawing on his own South Korean heritage, and experience of growing up in rural Arkansas, the director’s poignant, very personal fifth feature was selected as the Opening Night feature of the 2021 Glasgow Film…

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★★★★☆ “It’s the end of the line,” says a bus driver as he wakes a man who has fallen asleep on his route. Where was his stop? Does he not remember his name? Opening with an end, a journey unfinished, is the departure point for Christos Nikou’s cyclical meditation on memory, grief and new beginnings…

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★★★★☆ Led by a tour de force performance as savage, unpredictable and frightening as the film’s titular ursine, Black Bear stars Aubrey Plaza in stellar form as a writer-director seeking inspiration, in this bamboozling psychological character study. Art appears to imitate and draw upon life in Lawrence Michael Levine’s head-scratching, emotionally fraught follow-up to 2014’s…

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★★★☆☆ Floating somewhere between drama and fantasy, myth and reality, Christian Petzold’s Undine is a beguiling, other-worldly love story between a diver and a tour guide – or is she a mermaid? Brought to modern-day Berlin from the depths of German Renaissance philosophy, this supernatural allegory benefits from two strong lead performances, but is otherwise…

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★★☆☆☆ Expressly out of sight, with the intention of being out of mind, there were only so many monikers – Gitmo, Camp X-Ray – and so many excuses, pieces of questionable legislation, that the US government could throw at their activities in Guantánamo Bay before the truth would out. Based on the 2015 memoir Guantánamo…

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★★★★☆ “Things are not always the way they look, you know.” Behind the forced smiles and false bonhomie of replies to inane talk-show hosts, hidden truths lie. Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s Tina digs deep into the past, the resilience and the courage of an extraordinary woman. Unafraid to ask the tough questions where needed,…

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★★★★☆ The saying goes that in the movies you should never work with children or animals. Acclaimed documentary short filmmaker Elizabeth Lo proves the latter part of this old adage to be complete nonsense with her feature debut, Stray. Following the freewheeling day to day life of dogs living on the streets of Istanbul, the initial novelty…

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★★★☆☆ “Last year at this time we had snow, and now it’s nice.” An earth-shattering, potentially life-altering sea-change occurs behind closed doors for two women living under the constraints of Victorian conservatism in Francis Lee‘s Ammonite. Encompassing the cold, muted tone of the entire script – and indeed the era, this one line demonstrates, in…

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