DVD & Digital

DVD review: Eternal Beauty

It’s been a decade since Welsh actor Craig Roberts’ breakthrough performance in Richard Ayoade’s critically acclaimed indie film Submarine. Sally Hawkins played the part of his mother back then, and now she takes up the leading role in comedy drama Eternal Beauty, his second feature as writer and director. The plot centres around Jane (Hawkins) who suffered a psychological breakdown years earlier after being jilted at the altar. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, we see how she interacts with her sisters Nicola (Billie Piper) and Alice (Alice Lowe), her mother Vivian (Penelope Witton) and her madcap love interest Mike (David Thewlis) who has mental health issues of his own.

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DVD & Digital

DVD review: The Shape of Water

theshapeofwater

When we talk about visionary directors, imaginations don’t come more vivid than that of Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, known for concocting weird and wonderful dark fantasy fables. His latest effort is 60s romantic drama The Shape of Water, which follows mute cleaner Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) who works with her friend Zelda (Octavia Spencer) at an underground government laboratory. When their boss Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) brings a mysterious sea-creature to the facility to be held in captivity for scientific research, Elisa and the amphibian form an unorthodox relationship.

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Interviews

Director interview: Morgan Matthews – ‘I want to be creatively challenged and try all the different forms of storytelling, whether it’s documentary or fiction’.

morganmatthews

Inspired by his own film Beautiful Young Minds, British filmmaker Morgan Matthews directs ‘X+Y’, a story of a young boy with autism who has a gift for mathematics. The cast includes Asa Butterfield, Rafe Spall, Eddie Marsan and Sally Hawkins. It screened at Glasgow Film Festival and I was fortunate enough to speak to Morgan Matthews about the project…

Coming from a career in documentary filmmaking, why was this the right time for your first foray into feature fiction?

I’ve made a lot of documentaries and have done so in differing styles but at the same time felt that I was making them in quite a similar way. I want to be creatively challenged every time I make a film and try all the different forms of storytelling, and whether it’s documentary or fiction you’re still telling a story. In some ways there are a lot of similarities.

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