A collaboration between old friends from art school, Matangi / Maya / M.I.A. is not your average music doc. Most obviously because the music career of Sri Lankan born and Brixton bred rapper M.I.A. is only one component in a film exploring her beginnings, her inspirations, her activism and her global success in the early 2000s … Continue reading
Dramatised non-fiction is old territory for director Bart Layton whose first feature documentary The Imposter included tense re-enactment. His latest work takes things even further in an attempt to intertwine documentary and drama even more tightly. American Animals, based on a shambolic real-life heist at an American University in 2004, is for the most part a … Continue reading
Adapted from Emily M. Danforth’s book, The Miseducation of Cameron Post is the second feature from director Desiree Akhavan. In 2014, Akhavan explored the complexities of a modern woman’s sexuality (simultaneously winning over indie film audiences) in Appropriate Behaviour – a film which refreshingly focused on bisexuality – more specifically in conflict with family heritage, culture and … Continue reading
Spike Lee’s latest, loosely based on the early career of police-officer Ron Stallworth, opens with an icon scene from 1939’s Gone With the Wind. An iconic moment in American cinema, a distressed Scarlett O’Hara is wading through a sea of injured civil war soldiers. The camera gradually draws out, revealing the vast extent of the wounded. … Continue reading
Popularity and cruelty have gone hand in hand since the dawn of the high-school movie. Every American coming-of-age romp explores high school’s twisted social hierarchy. Mean Girls, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Grease and The Breakfast Club; these movies all explore the inner politics of the playground within an age old status quo. A dog-eat-dog world, high-school has never been more … Continue reading
On the surface, Tara seems to have everything any mother and wife could ever want; two young children, an attentive husband, a beautiful house, two cars and financial security. With her husband earning enough money to support them both, Tara’s days are spent getting the children to and from the local primary school, tending to … Continue reading
Stern, tight-lipped mother and devoted Jehovah’s Witness Ivanna is raising her two teenage daughters within the strict, secular religion to which she has committed her life. Each daughter carries with them weighty doubts and when one sister falls away from the faith, Ivanna is faced with pressure to minimise contact with her in order to … Continue reading
James Dean, Heath Ledger, River Phoenix; actors we most prominently associate with dying young. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Steve McQueen and James Gandolfini; others who died not particularly young, but certainly too soon. Yet, for me there is one actor who stands above them all, if not for his near-perfect body of work but purely for … Continue reading
You can learn a lot about a person by snooping through their DVD collection. Whether it’s uncovering a shameful love of Steven Seagal movies or an unrealised obsession with Buster Keaton, beware, for one’s film collection can be the basis for a judgement of overall character. Personally, being a cinephile always went hand in hand … Continue reading
Nick Broomfield and Kevin Macdonald, both giants of the British documentary industry, have each explored the self-destructive life and intense global career of Whitney Houston. Almost exactly a year after Broomfield’s Whitney: Can I Be Me comes Macdonald’s simplistically entitled Whitney – this time signed off by Houston’s family and estate. Where Broomfield’s limited access meant he drew largely … Continue reading
