Film

Tropic Thunder

Reality bites

4 Sep 2008

Shaping up as this season’s most riotous comedy, Tropic Thunder casts Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr as three self-important actors making a movie in a real war zone. They talk to Miles Fielder about satirising Hollywood and scandalising…

Angel

4 Sep 2008

After years of gleeful, near bi-polar genre shifting, France’s greatest living film parodist, Francois Ozon (5x2, 8 Women, Sitcom), makes the film that every gay teenager, who has grown up in the latter part of the 20th century, would kill to…

Pineapple Express

4 Sep 2008

As with last year’s Superbad, male bonding lies at the heart of the latest Judd Apatow production which also comes from the screenwriting team of Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen. After playing one of the cops in Superbad and starring in Knocked Up, Rogen…

RocknRolla

4 Sep 2008

Is there a filmmaker in Britain who’s been more derided than Mr Madonna? A bit unfair all this criticism is too: it’s not Guy Ritchie’s fault that the competent, very watchable gangster flicks Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch were some of…

The Banishment

4 Sep 2008

Fledgling master Russian filmmaker Andrei The Return Zvyagintsev’s flawed second feature is a nonetheless interesting fusion of British gangster flick Sexy Beast, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and (thematically at least) Scenes from a Marriage as created by…

The Duchess

4 Sep 2008

In his second film feature UK filmmaker Saul Bullet Boy Dibb retells the tragic true life story of 18th/early 19th Century aristocrat Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire. Celebrated beauty and socialite Georgiana (Keira Knightley) is married off…

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

4 Sep 2008

Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the nine-year-old son of a Nazi Commandant (David Thewlis). When his father is seconded to manage a concentration camp in a remote area of the Fascist empire, the lonely Bruno makes a new friend, Schmuel (Jack Scanlon), beyond…

Bangkok Dangerous

4 Sep 2008

Arriving in Bangkok to execute some contracts, hitman Joe (Nic Cage) quickly finds himself immersed in the city’s corrupt and dirty lifestyle. Hiring local henchman Kong (Shahkrit Yamnarm) to serve as a middleman, he goes about his brutal business with…

Black, White + Gray

4 Sep 2008

James Crump’s documentary revisits the contentious work, life and times of seminal 80s photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The artist’s legacy is re-examined through a close study of the life of his partner and patron, the curator and collector, Sam…

Botched

4 Sep 2008

An inept jewel thief (Stephen Dorff) is given one last chance by Russian Mafiosa with a heist from an apartment block. Our robber and his Russian cohorts inevitably screw up, and are the pursued, along with an eccentric group of hostages, through a…

Coming soon

4 Sep 2008

Witness the fitness of this autumn’s movie schedule - 88 Minutes, Blindness, Body of Lies, Burn After Reading, Choke, Death Race, Easy Virtue, Faintheart, Fears of the Dark, Ghost Town, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson, How To Lose…

Cut to the chase

4 Sep 2008

Eddie Harrison investigates the low fi, low budget revolution going on in Scottish filmmaking. Jean-Luc Godard said all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun. But anyone who has ever picked up a camera knows that cash in the bank helps too. The…

Disaster Movie

4 Sep 2008

New spoof comedy from the Epic Movie/Meet the Spartans folk. Blockbuster disaster flicks plus the Indiana Jones franchise, Iron Man and High School Musical get lampooned to tedious effect. General release from Fri 5 Sep.

DVD roundup

4 Sep 2008

We start this horror round-up with a trio of box sets. The John Carpenter Collection, The Roger Corman Collection, Blacula

Eden Lake

4 Sep 2008

For obvious reasons, youth violence has become a favourite theme of British horror films recently. It’s strange that this trend seems to be going from strength to strength as none of the films, from Thomas Clay’s 2005 shocker The Great Ecstasy of Robert…

Jar City

4 Sep 2008

(15) 94min Compelling Icelandic police procedural thriller about a jaundiced middle-aged cop on the trail of a decades old mystery involving rape, corruption and murder. Writer/director (and leading Icelandic actor) Baltasar 101 Reykavik Kormákur…

Jesus Camp

4 Sep 2008

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s fly-on-the-wall documentary might easily be classified as a kind of real life horror film. In it we follow one Pastor Becky as she gears up to, and runs a summer camp for born again Christian children and their families.

Marianna Palka

Interview

4 Sep 2008

To get her first film made Glasgow-born Marianna Palka had to do it all herself, she tells Miles Fielder. Talk about indie spirit. In order to make her first feature, the low-budget, highly offbeat and very accomplished romantic comedy Good Dick…

National Lampoon's Cattle Call

4 Sep 2008

It’s a shame that National Lampoon, long associated with tasteless but somehow crudely endearing comedy, should have lent its name to this effort by writer/director Martin Guigui (Swing, Changing Hearts). In it, we meet three young males who hatch a…

New film & DVD releases

4 Sep 2008

Witness the fitness of this autumn's movie schedule.

Profile: Saul Dibb

4 Sep 2008

Name: Saul Dibb, Born: London, England, 1968. Background: Dibb started his career working on documentaries. Lifters followed a group of shoplifters and 2003’s Easy Money detailed the life of a couple working in the porn industry. He also worked as a…

Reworking practice

4 Sep 2008

With the big screen adaptation of Brideshead Revisited on the horizon Eddie Harrison examines other upcoming revamps

Robert De Niro

Family affair

4 Sep 2008

What better way to kick off a preview of this autumn’s movie highlights than with a bona-fide legend, Robert De Niro. The two-time Oscar winner has always been notoriously reticent about his private life, but here Richard Mowe finds him playing a family…

The Pope's Toilet (El Baño del Papa)

4 Sep 2008

DRAMA (EL BANO DEL PAPA) (15) 98min Like the recent Couscous, The Pope’s Toilet works up a great deal of narrative tension out of what are very believable anxieties. Its strength is that it generates a plot out of real life and real concerns.

The Women

4 Sep 2008

Depressing update of Clare Booth Luce’s 1936 satirical play set amid the idle and bitchy world of wealthy wives and divorcees. Immensely popular in its day (it ran on Broadway for over a year) and most famously adapted by Anita Loos for George Cukor’s…