Film, Issue 591

The Golden Compass - Heart of Darkness

Everyone wanted Nicole Kidman to play Mrs Coulter. From the makers of the blockbuster film adaptation of The Golden Compass through the millions of fans of Philip Pullman’s bestselling fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials to the author of the novels…

One Minute Wonder - Minute Masters

One year ago The List and media production company Metro Ecosse launched our first ever short film competition. One Minute Wonder was an entry-level screenwriting competition open to anyone aged over 16 who lives in Scotland. It was also the first…

Hitman - Blood money

Hitman is the latest in a long line of videogames to make the jump from console to big screen. Despite the flops (think Super Mario Brothers and Street Fighter) studios just don’t seem able to keep their hands off videogame properties, with the Resident…

The Golden Compass

FANTASY/ADAPTATION (12A) 105min JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and JK Rowling may have all the initials and most of the sales but fair-minded fantasy fans know deep down that Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is the genre’s true shining light.

The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford

WESTERN (15) 159min Arch confederate and violent outlaw Jesse James was and is a gift for dramatists. With numerous appearances in literature, film, theatre and music, American folklore’s Robin Hood seems as unstill in his grave now as he was when…

Andrew Dominik - Contrary cowboy

It’s taken New Zealand-born, Australia-bred filmmaker Andrew Dominik (pictured) seven years to make the follow-up to his much-praised debut, Chopper. Like that film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a wildly unconventional…

You Kill Me

COMEDY/THRILLER (15) 92min John The Last Seduction Dahl’s latest film is a work of modest ambition that manages to hit just the right notes. The gleefully morbid script, by screenwriting team Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (The Life and…

Profile - Rigoberto Castaneda

Name Rigoberto Castaneda Born 27 February 1973, Mexico City Background Castaneda was working as a runner in a production house in Mexico City when he was given a book about Alfred Hitchcock and was inspired to take a course in filmmaking. Having…

Also Released - Film

Earth (U) 90min ••• Feature-length version of the BBC Planet Earth documentary series from the team who brought you 2003’s Deep Blue. Cineworld Renfrew Street, Glasgow from Fri 30 Nov. All About Eve (U) 138min •••• Digital re-release of Joseph L…

Silent Light (Stellet Licht)

DRAMA (15) 182min To mention Carlos Reygadas’ winsome Silent Light in the same breath as key directors Carl Theodor Dreyer, Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson, and the more recent Bruno Dumont is not hyperbole. The six-minute opening shot of a…

The Killing Of John Lennon

By his own admission Mark David Chapman was nobody until he killed the biggest somebody on earth. That somebody was ex-Beatle John Lennon who he shot on 8 December 1980 outside the Dakota Buildings in New York. Despite being completed over 18 months…

Southland Tales

SCI FI/COMEDY/DRAMA (15) 144min Los Angeles, 4 July 2008. Society is on the brink of social, economic and environmental collapse and an action star/boxer, a porn star and a police officer are making a last stand. Writer/director Richard Kelly’s…

Ahlaam (Dreams)

WAR/DRAMA (15) 110min Based on the real life testimonials of some of the mental asylum patients who found themselves cut loose on the streets of bombed out Baghdad in the early days of the invasion by American led Coalition forces in 2003…

He Was A Quiet Man

DRAMA/COMEDY (15) 95min It seems a long time ago that Christian Slater was making a living as the ‘young Jack Nicholson’ in teen yarns Heathers and Pump Up The Volume. In this audacious crime caper, written and directed by Frank A Cappello (No Way…

Fred Claus

FAMILY/COMEDY (PG) 115min In his third film with director David Dobkin (Clay Pigeons, The Wedding Crashers) Vince Vaughn trades far too heavily on his familiar wise-guy charms in this cloying Joel The Matrix Silver-produced Christmas offering.

The Magic Flute

OPERA (PG) 138 min Kenneth Branagh’s version of As You Like It was the most misconceived Shakespeare movie in living memory. News that he planned to transfer Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute to the battlefields of World War One did not bode well…

A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash

DOCUMENTARY (PG) 83min With The Guardian recently offering the front page headline ‘World economy shakes as oil nears $100 a barrel’, A Crude Awakening is nothing if not pertinent, giving credence to the film’s thesis that it isn’t money that…

Jason Nelson

PRINTMAKING, FILM The Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 22 Dec The Collective Gallery’s annual New Work Scotland exhibition this year showcases, among others, the work of Dundee-based artist Jason Nelson. Born in the ex-mining town of Kelty…

Syndromes and a Century

DRAMA (15) 106min Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s undeniably mysterious film is loosely based on his parents’ experience of working in a rural hospital in Thailand. As with the director’s other work (notably 2002’s Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady…

Codename: The Cleaner

COMEDY (12A) 84min So-called comedian Cedric the Entertainer should change his name to Cedric the Complete Non-Event on the evidence of this painfully un-entertaining spoof on the Jason Bourne movies. Having directed genuinely unfunny vehicles for…

Across the Universe

When Julie Taymor’s musical homage to the hippy era came out at the end of September it received terrible reviews and slipped off cinema screens quicker than you could say ‘all you need is love’. Taymor has previous form for daring to film the…

Deborah Kerr

Farewell to Helensburgh’s celebrated movie goddess. Kerr died in October this year after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. Both cities honour this ironically-labelled ‘quintessential English rose’ this month. In Glasgow a short season of three…

A Massacre Foretold

Scottish documentary maker Nick Higgins’ commendable and deeply disturbing film investigates the murder of 45 people at a prayer meeting in a Mexican village in 1997. The film gets a brief outing in both cities this fortnight. Also showing is Higgins…

Blade Runner: Final Cut

Some filmmakers just love to fiddle, and Ridley Scott is one of the worst fiddlers in the business. This is (allegedly) the final, definitive cut of his already near iconic 1982 sci fi classic. In any version this great movie is well worth catching on…