Film, Issue 569

Gay movie round-up

Gay screen

12 Feb 2007

The Glasgow Film Festival programmes five films with a queer bent this year. It’s unbearably hot in The Wayward Cloud , where Taiwan’s heatwave causes the sales of watermelons to shoot up. Hsiao-Kang tries to hide the fact that he’s a porn actor from…

The Number 23

12 Feb 2007

MYSTERY/THRILLER This conspiracy theory chiller, penned by first time British screenwriter Fernley Phillips, turns on the notion that the number 23 is a diabolic digit pairing that’s ubiquitous and exhibits a pernicious effect on the world (the DNA…

Casablanca

(U) 102min

12 Feb 2007

NEW PRINT/CLASSIC Michael Curtiz’s superb 1942 classic re-emerges from the evergreen bush in a sparkling new print (both celluloid and digital depending where you see it). Nothing much has changed - it’s war time in Algeria and cynical nightclub…

News Extra

14 Feb 2007

Lonely Planet is making a jaunt north of the border to host screenings of the 1969 cult classic The Italian Job and offbeat French romantic comedy Amelie on Thursday 22 and Wednesday 28 March at Edinburgh’s Cameo cinema. The films are being shown as…

Good Shepherd, The

The Good Shepherd

12 Feb 2007

HISTORY/THRILLER In 1977 a US Privacy Study Commission surmised that the real danger of the Central Intelligence Agency is ‘the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate…

Hot Fuzz

(15) 120min

12 Feb 2007

COMEDY/SPOOF It is slightly depressing that the highest grossing British films of last year and this were, and will be, television spin-offs. Last year Sacha Baron Cohen delivered up the better-than-we-probably-deserve feature film Borat, and now…

Letters from Iwo Jima

(15) 140min

12 Feb 2007

WAR/EPIC Clint Eastwood follows up his admirable but uneven World War II movie Flags of Our Fathers with a second, more accomplished, film looking at the battle for the Pacific island of Iwo Jima. This time the focus is on the Japanese as opposed to…

Orchestra Seats

(12A) 105min

12 Feb 2007

COMEDY ‘A comedy about people who are suffering’, is how director and co-writer Danièle Thompson describes Orchestra Seats. In fact, this predictable slice of middlebrow entertainment resembles a Gallic Love Actually. Set in and around Paris…

PlayList - the best film downloads

PlayList

12 Feb 2007

'Intertainment’ isn’t something that requires you to be an über geek with a bit torrent jack plug in the back of your head. The streams on popular sites like You Tube, Google Video or Dailymotion don’t require complicated downloads, all you have to do…

Science of Sleep, The - feature

Sleep talking

12 Feb 2007

A love story set in Paris might not sound like terribly promising material, but Michel Gondry lets his feverish imagination run riot in The Science of Sleep. The resulting romantic fantasia is undoubtedly one of the most original films of the past year.

Star, The - DVD review

The Star

12 Feb 2007

WAR This is a disappointing Russian WWII film about a team of ‘scouts’ sent on a very risky mission behind German lines to check out the enemy’s equipment and tactics. Selling itself as a film in the tradition of Elem Klimov’s great war film Come and…

Tokyo Drifter - DVD review

Tokyo Drifter

12 Feb 2007

CRIME/DRAMA One of three excellent reissues of the films of the great Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki (the other two on release are his erotic and darkly humorous 1967 gangster film Branded to Kill and his most directly autobiographical film…

Grapevine - showbiz news

Grapevine

13 Feb 2007

Expect many cries of ‘there’s been a murder’ with news that more episodes are to be filmed of ITV ScotCop dramas Taggart and Rebus . Four new 90-minute mysteries of the former start filming in April and further adventures for Ian Rankin’s world-weary…

*Hitlist

Hitlist

12 Feb 2007

Science of Sleep Filmmaker Michel Gondry asserts himself as the natural heir to Jean Cocteau with this fantastical and surreal French comedy. Selected release from Fri 16 Feb.

DVD Round-up

12 Feb 2007

Back in the early part of the 20th century when cinema first spluttered to life, all films were short films. Film stock was expensive and temperamental and the idea that anyone would want to spend longer than 15 minutes in a Nickelodeon was an anathema.

Eros - DVD review

Eros

12 Feb 2007

ANTHOLOGY How could such an intriguing idea go so horribly, flaccidly wrong? If the demonstration of some pent-up sexual emotion was needed, who better to call than Messrs Antonioni, Soderbergh and Kar-wai to unleash a cinematic torrent? Except this…

Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, The - DVD review

(18) 97min (Tartan DVD rental/retail)

12 Feb 2007

POLEMIC/DRAMA Thomas Clay’s visceral, disturbing but interesting 2005 film did not get a theatrical release in Scotland so now is your chance, if you have the stomach for it, to catch it on DVD. Set in an English seaside town at the beginning of…

Into Great Silence

(U) 169min

12 Feb 2007

DOCUMENTARY Shakespeare’s comment that ‘The silence of pure innocence persuades when speaking fails’ pervades German documentarian Philip Gröning’s film about life inside a silent Carthusian monastic order in France. For Into Great Silence is less of…

Profile - Annette Bening

Profile

12 Feb 2007

Name Annette Bening Born May 29, 1958 in Topeka, Kansas, US. Background Bening’s acting career began when she played the lead in her high school’s production of The Sound of Music. After graduating from San Francisco University she took to the…

Science of Sleep, The (La Science des Reves)

The Science of Sleep (La Science des Reves)

12 Feb 2007

COMEDY/FANTASY French auteur Michel Gondry asserts himself as the natural heir to Jean Cocteau in this his third feature proper. Welcome to the mind-bending world of Stéphane Miroux (Gael García Bernal), a shy Mexican who exists in a perpetual…