MOVIE REVIEW
The Matador (2008)
Mauricio Berho/City Lights Pictures
“The Matador,” the new documentary by Stephen Higgins and Nina Gilden Seavey, differs pronouncedly from the better-known recent movie that shared its title – the Pierce Brosnan-Greg Kinnear dark comedy. For example, this is actually a movie about a Spanish matador – the enormously popular David Fandila – and the sport he practices. It’s interested in the uneasy, ongoing adaptation of the regal, old-fashioned sport of bullfighting to the post-modern, politically-correct world and the ways in which Mr. Fandila deals with his celebrity, not in approximating the dysfunctional buddy relationship at the heart of the fictional “Matador.” So, no one should get them confused.