MATT STRACHAN

Layers are good. They tend to provide depth, texture, complexity, randomness and pretty much everything else in between. Life is one infinite messy shifting mosaic of them, including those not so good – the layers that generate doubt and eat away at self-assurance, transparency, understanding. But as far as art is concerned, layers are essential – the more, the murkier, the better…

What happens if you take Kimberly Peirce’s Oscar-winning Boys Don’t Cry, exchange small town America for the suburbs of Paris and make Hilary Swank’s character a ten year old girl? You pretty much get Céline Sciamma’s Berlin-winning Tomboy – a beautifully shot evocation of childhood that delicately explores a fledgling identity crisis and manages to illuminate the sensitive subjects of gender…

Music appears to be particularly fertile ground for film these days. With more and more film festivals moving towards live performances alongside screenings – be it orchestral scores to silent films or bands playing after a film that relates in some way – and an increasing reliance on popular musicians as composers (Jonny Greenwood, Nick Cave, Alex Turner, and so on), there seems no limit to the…

If The Wonder Years – that much-cherished teenage chronicle of ‘60s and ‘70s American suburbia – had a Cold War cousin to race…

In their attempts to escape the traditional confines of British film (taking particular care not to take the kitchen sink) and visit the sunnier, money-er climes of the genre mainstream or American indieville, our home-grown directors seem keen to wear their cinematic influences on their celebrity-already sleeves. Earlier this year it was Truffaut’s Blows in a Wes Anderson world, courtesy of Richard…

Documentary Day – the East End Film Festival’s doc-dedicated industry programme – turned out to be a day of judgement, of sorts. Not the Last, fortunately – it’s unlikely God would choose Brick Lane on a chilly Tuesday for that, and surely not days away from the headline-hogging Royal Wedding. But judgement, in one form or another, bubbled beneath the surface of the sessions, whether…

A Small Act rides the ripple effect of a good deed that runs from Sweden to Kenya, from Harvard to the UN, from World War II to the future of the Third World. Director Jennifer Arnold talks to DFG about balancing stories past and present, drunk 12 year old videographers, and filmmaking fate…

If F. Scott Fitzgerald was right, and “action is character”, then the title given to Jennifer Arnold’s documentary about the limitless possibilities of a single gesture (to riff on its tagline a little) is an acute observation on the film’s particular limitations as well as the engine powering its premise…

You’d think Andy Garcia would be acutely aware of the pitfalls associated with making a film about a dysfunctional and secretive New York family that stars Andy Garcia and casts the producer’s daughter in a supporting role. After all, he’s been in every single one of them. And yet like some Hollywood psychopath, oblivious to the disappointing mediocrity that was The Godfather: Part III, he’s gone…

Cave of Forgotten Dreams uses 3D technology to full shuddering effect as it delves into France’s Chauvet Cave to shine a light on paintings 35,000 years old and the awe of humanness itself. Director Werner Herzog talks to DFG about Jacques Cousteau, WrestleMania and lowering his head to charge…

The crusty polyester, sensible fleeces, and plain pre-fab offices of assorted archaeologists, in various drab blushes of grey and brown, were probably not at the forefront of James Cameron’s mind when he revitalised 3D by dreaming up a Pandora’s box office of bright blue aliens, deep metaphor (unobtanium anyone?) and billion dollar domination. And yet they sit comfortably, in blistering…

Dictionaries aren’t exactly sexy. They don’t typically help sell things to hapless consumers, they don’t generally add fizz to otherwise stagnant films/relationships/anything else you can think of. Did Jean-Luc Godard suggest that all you need for a movie is a girl and a dictionary? No. There’s a good reason for that. And yet the brilliantly tense climax to Police, Adjective consists, primarily, of a 19…

This may be disappointing to a small minority, but Marathon Boy is not a superhero film (villains roughly 26 miles away that need to be stopped in several hours’ time are, apparently, few and far between). It does, however, follow a hero’s journey so ripe for the making of myth that Joseph Campbell would be proud, and culminates in tragedy so Shakespearian it’s hard to believe he didn’t write it. All the…

Watching Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen is a little bit like watching a Tarantino movie in referential reverse. With martial arts as its bread and butter baseline, Legend cherry picks from American films and genres in the same way that Tarantino – the magpie of movies himself – ‘borrows’ at will from Asian and exploitation cinema. Unfortunately Andrew Lau is no Quentin Tarantino, and the…

The most striking thing that emerged from this year’s Shorts2Feature strand (or at least its opening film – Ken Wardrop’s His & Hers – and the panel discussion at its centre) was how shorts and features exist less and less as opposing ends of some mythical abyss that filmmakers must ‘leap’, and are increasingly becoming size-relative components of a Russian doll style cinema (or cinematic…

Paradoxically, as super-fast broadband and D-suffixed televisions (H-, 3-, no doubt before long double-) are gradually killing the crowd as film knows it (everybody sat alone in their pants gawping at their own 3.5 inches of iPhone doesn’t quite cut it), up-and-coming filmmakers intent on making the all-important move from shorts to first feature have never been so singularly defined by the crowd as…

Black Swan - Wow! The punch of live performance ground in film’s gristle. The Wrestler en pointe. Impressive.

Boxing Gym - Minimal on narrative, but elevates the rhythm of persistent routine to a kind of every-story art. Nice.

Pink Saris - Classic Longinotto – funny yet tragic, personal yet illuminating, always universally human. But with pink neon highlights.

Southern District - Mesmerisingly beautiful, if a little long. Imagine Gaspar Noe doing Gosford Park in Bolivia and you get an idea.

If the Watergate scandal had been uncovered by the tabloid press, then Carry On Reporting might have walked away with four Oscars on 28th March 1977 instead of All The President’s Men. Similarly, Morris’ most recent documentary Tabloid – a foray into the sensational story of a beauty queen, a Mormon missionary, an abduction and the low-brow media frenzy that followed – is a much…

If BAFTAs were awarded on the basis of film titles alone, then All I Ever Wanted: The Airborne Toxic Event Live from Walt Disney Concert Hall would be in the running for at least two. It might be a close contest for Longest Title glory, but it’s hard to imagine anybody else walking away with the BAFTA for Cleverly Combining The Words ‘Toxic’ and ‘Walt Disney’ In A Seemingly Innocent Sentence…

This may be the only time you’ll ever read these words (or perhaps not, in which case seek help), but Meat Loaf said it best with his 1970s power ballad – “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad”. And whilst sex, religion and politics form that rock solid tripartite of ‘topics to absolutely avoid at dinner parties’, any one of these singular ingredients can be more than enough to make for a compelling…