Film, Issue 568

Dirty Dancing: 20th Anniversary Edition

(15) 100min

For the few who don’t know the plot of Emile Ardolino’s 1987 romantic musical: it’s the summer of 1963 at Kellerman’s Holiday Resort. Misunderstood, frustrated in-house dance teacher, Johnny (an unconvincingly teenage Patrick Swayze), meets…

Avenge But One of My Two Eyes - DVD review

Avenge But One of My Two Eyes

DOCUMENTARY Avi Mograbi’s tough-minded documentary on the horrors of today’s Israeli-Palestine conflict looks at events not from the point of view of Palestinian fanaticism and Israeli brutality, but chiefly from the long established fanaticism…

Glasgow Film Festival - horror movies

Day of the dead

The all-day marathon is a right of passage for any horrorphile; a chance to wallow in the garish glory of the most extreme cinematic genres. For the second year, GFF features FrightFest in association with Zone Horror.

Cate Blanchett interview

Woman of note

‘If I knew that my son’s art teacher was banging his brains out in the art room, I’d be in there with a meat cleaver.’ Cate Blanchett is reflecting on her new film, Notes on a Scandal, in which she plays an art teacher who has an affair with one of her…

Fast Food Nation

Food for thought

Eric Schlosser touched a nerve with the public when he exposed the unethical and unhygienic practices of America’s junk food industry in his book Fast Food Nation. It swiftly became an international bestseller and required reading for anyone concerned…

News in brief

Al Gore’s climate change film, An Inconvenient Truth, is to be shown in all of Scotland’s secondary schools. Friends of the Earth Scotland’s Chief Executive, Duncan McLaren, said of the Executive initiative: ‘For the sake of future generations we hope…

John Huston retrospective

A drunken god

The prolific, gifted and deeply eccentric writer/director John Huston preferred to think that ‘God is not dead, just drunk.’ It’s a cute quote, which fits in with the air of Irish whimsy that Huston attempted to generate around himself and his uprooted…

DVD Round-up

Shy, prone to stage sickness, deep depression and melancholia the British comedian Frankie Howerd was still the funniest man ever tp have been born in the city of York, England. A brilliant, stammering pontificate of a stand-up comedian, Howerd’s talent…

Dreamgirls

Dreamgirls has made Oscar history and the ceremony hasn’t even taken place yet. It is, allegedly, the first picture to have the most Academy Award nominations in a given year and still not be nominated for Best Picture. And, for once, the Academy seems…

Notes on a Scandal

Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) - note that grasping surname - is not a popular figure at the North London comprehensive where she teaches history. To the staff and the students she is, in her own words, ‘a battleaxe’, and to the headmaster, she is an…

Running with Scissors

Nip/Tuck writer/executive producer Ryan Murphy does a very fine job of cutting/pasting onto the big screen the horrific and hilarious teenage memoir of journalist Augusten Burroughs. Abandoned first by his alcoholic father Norman (Alec Baldwin) and then…

Play

‘Times were hard but they were modern’ runs the unattributed Italian proverb at the beginning of this vibrant debut feature from young Chilean writer-director Alicia Scherson, which provides a real tonic for jaded cinematic palates. Described by its…

Belle de Jour

(18) 99min

The very great Spanish filmmaker and surrealist Luis Buñuel wrote in his fantastic autobiography My Last Breath that Belle de Jour was ‘my biggest commercial success, which I attribute more to the marvellous whores than to my direction.…

For Your Consideration

(12A) 86min

The law of diminishing returns finally hits Christopher Guest and the team who have worked together since This Is Spinal Tap reconfigured the rockumentary back in 1984. Encouraged by the success of that film, which, despite being directed by Rob Reiner…

Arthur and the Invisibles

(U) 93min

If Luc Besson (The Big Blue, Leon) is to be believed, this, his tenth film, will also be his last as director. In adapting his own children’s book, Besson mixes live-action and CGI animation with decidedly patchy results. It’s heavy on style but light…

Grand Illusion, La - DVD review

La Grand Illusion

WAR After La Grande Illusion won a prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1937, the Nazis declared it ‘cinematic enemy number one’, and when Germany invaded France a couple of years later Goebbels had prints of the film destroyed. Jean Renoir’s…

Angel-A - DVD review

Angel-A

FANTASY DRAMA For Berlin, read Paris. For Wings of Desire, transpose Angel-A. But while Wim Wenders’ 80s classic still sparkles, this occasionally charming Luc Besson effort instantly pales by comparison. The problems are several fold, but the jovial…

Passenger (Pasazerka) - DVD review

Passenger (Pasazerka)

DRAMA Passenger is one of the great, overlooked films to deal with the Holocaust. Andrzej Munk’s film stands alongside Night and Fog and Shoah as a seminal examination of this crater in 20th century life and thought. Unlike those films, however, this…