Comedy, Reviews, Miles Fielder

Justin Moorhouse

Brash comic’s storytelling mash-up

Justin Moorhouse kicks off his show by taking issue with a review from last year’s Fringe that likened him to a cross between Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown and Coldplay. It’s hard to see the comparison between the drippy bleeding heart liberal rockers and…

Hardeep Singh Kohli

Laugh-lite Glaswegian gourmet

During his enforced leave of absence from the BBC, the Scottish Sikh star of The One Show is indulging his fondness for cooking with this culinary-themed comedy show. The simple set-up has Kohli cooking a meal on stage, based on ingredients supplied on…

The Event

Brilliant deconstruction of stand-up

Like so many brilliant ideas the thinking behind this superb show is simple: stand-up deconstructed. A comedian walks on stage to begin what his audience assumes will be a standard comedy routine. Expectations are immediately overturned, however, with a…

Mackenzie Taylor

Painfully funny trip through mental illness

Taylor took a year off the Fringe in 2008 after he’d tried to kill himself. This year, the likeable hairy bear’s back to tell us all about it with this blow-by-blow account of the mental illness he’s lived with for 15 years and the almost fatal ménage à…

Alan Francis & Barnaby Power

Satisfying stings and filthy finales

Two blokes delivering a series of sketches stitched together with a bit of banter might make for a fairly conventional act, but the delivery is pitch perfect and the timing spot on here, all of which makes this comedian-actor duo’s show well worth…

Parade

Released in 1974, the final film by the great French silent comedian Jacques Tati is a typically playful, though also extremely eloquent ending to his quarter-century film career. On the face of it nothing more than a series of circus acts compered by…

Gigantic

ROMANCE/COMEDY Having done morose to such great comic effect as a mute Goth kid in Little Miss Sunshine and zealous to fine dramatic impact as the phoney preacher in There Will Be Blood, boyishly good looking American actor Paul Dano graduates from…

The Fan

COMEDY Disliked by its director and indifferently received both critically and commercially when first released in 1949, Otto Preminger’s 1949 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s celebrated play Lady Windermere’s Fan is long overdue for reappraisal. It’s…

The Ruling Class

COMEDY/MUSICAL Olivier Award-winning dramatist Peter Barnes’ adaptation of his own acclaimed play, directed for the screen in 1972 by Hungarian émigré Peter Medak (The Krays, Let Him Have It), was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes and secured…

Sex Drive

COMEDY Determined not to start college a virgin, semi-nerdy teenager Ian (Josh Zuckerman, best known as Young Dr Evil in the Austin Powers sequel Goldmember) drives across country to bed a red-hot babe he met on the internet named Ms Tasty. Fuelled…

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

COMEDY Toby Young’s semi-scandalous memoir about the period the gobby English journo spent carousing with the rich and famous, while working at Vanity Fair magazine in New York is given a mainstream movie makeover with this enjoyable enough romantic…

Jimeoin

Refining a lost art of the commonplace

Less is definitely more with this Irish comic. Although he's playing to a packed house, Jimeoin eschews the customary mic-stand and bellowing delivery and instead wears a discreet ear-piece, talks softly, mumbles quite a bit and relies on facial…

Nick Doody

Merging satire with daftness

A technical hitch during the previous show delays the returning Fringe comedian's show by 15 minutes, but soon the relatively substantial crowd sits in the dark watching Nick Doody's entree, a stereo slideshow of global news horror stories intercut with…

Made of Honour

ROMANTIC COMEDY (12A) 101min Tom (former teen heartthrob Patrick Dempsey) is a wealthy New York City playboy. Hannah (Michelle Monaghan) is Tom’s best friend and the single constant female companion in the life of a serial shagger. But when Hannah is…

In Bruges

CRIME/COMEDY (18) 107min A pair of mismatched professional hitmen are sent to the picturesque titular Belgian city to lie low after a job in London goes wrong. There, young philistine Ray (Colin Farrell) and older, cultured Ken (Brendan Gleeson) argue…

Semi-Pro

COMEDY (15) 91min Will Ferrell raises his game with this typically energetic and supremely daft ‘frat pack’ comedy that also boasts a surprising winning streak in its semi-serious celebration of the now defunct American Basketball Association. With…

Wristcutters: A Love Story

There’s a thick-blooded vein of Slavic humour running through Croatian writer-director Goran Dukic’s absurdist purgatorial romantic comedy. Adapted from Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s short story, Kneller’s Happy Campers, Dukic’s feature debut boasts a…

Death at a Funeral

DRAMA/COMEDY (15) 90min Having reportedly had his hands burned by the studios, who demanded re-shoots and re-cuts to what turned out to be a risible remake of The Stepford Wives, director Frank Oz (Mr Muppets to you and me) turns his not untalented…

Black Sheep

It was only a matter of time before an enterprising New Zealand filmmaker made a horror movie about sheep. It’s surprising it’s taken this long for one to reach the big screen, and more surprising still, given the inherent low horror factor of lamb…

Rocket Science

COMEDY/DRAMA (15) 101min Having charmed cinema-goers with his enthralling Oscar-nominated documentary Spellbound, director Jeffrey Blitz works a different kind of magic with this beguiling fiction film debut. Where his first film followed a bunch of…