SXSW 2021: Bantú Mama review
★★★☆☆ Escaping Paris for a week’s rest and relaxation in the Dominican Republic, Emma (Clarisse Albrecht) says goodbye to pet parrot Coco in the opening moments of Bantú Mama.
Film Reviews & More
Most Recent. In Matthew Anderson.
17 February 2023
Film Review: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
★★★★☆ Bite-sized pearls of wisdom and wonderment from everyone’s favourite YouTube crustacean sensation make an elegant shuffle, frequent leaps and occasional tumbles from the internet to the big screen in Dean Fleischer Camp’s marvellous Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.
25 May 2022
Film Review: Luzzu
★★★★☆ Maltese-American filmmaker Alex Camilleri’s Luzzu charts a course between the dispassionate neorealism of the Dardenne brothers and Gianfranco Rosi’s keen but objective documentarian eye. It is a touching parable of fathers and sons, tradition and modernity, principles versus practicality.
13 May 2022
Film Review: The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson
★★☆☆☆ Actor, playwright, novelist and now screenwriter-director Leah Purcell – a Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri woman from rural Queensland – makes her debut with The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson.
Matthew Anderson
Film Review: Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
★★★☆☆ Shades of Hitchcock blend with paranoia, self-doubt and deception in Lili Horvát’s Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time. Returning...
SXSW 2021: Our Father review
★★☆☆☆ In spite of two very game central performances by newcomers Baize Busan and Allison Torem, Bradley Grant Smith’s Our Father is the flattest of family drama-comedies.
SXSW 2021: The Lost Sons review
★★☆☆☆ Though the twists and turns of an extraordinary story – a baby stolen at birth, mistaken identities, genealogical discoveries, a fifty-year quest for the truth – are compelling, Ursula Macfarlane’s The Lost Sons has the feel of a somewhat formulaic, made-for-TV documentary.
SXSW 2021: Ludi review
★★★☆☆ Bound by a self-imposed obligation to send money to family back home in Haiti, caregiver Ludi works all the hours God sends in Floridian filmmaker Edson Jean’s debut Ludi.
SXSW 2021: Luchadoras review
★★★★☆ In the opening moments of Paola Calvo and Patrick Jasim’s Luchadoras, female workers take a bumpy bus ride to factories situated on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
SXSW 2021: Kid Candidate review
★★★★☆ Jasmine Stodel’s Kid Candidate follows 24-year-old Hayden Pedigo from debut campaign no-hoper to improbable torchbearer for the disenfranchised youth and ignored, impoverished minorities of Amarillo, Texas.
Glasgow 2021: City Hall review
★★★★★ “The concept of resilience is a powerful one.” Channelling the fortitude and resolve with which his beloved city of Boston recovered from the...
