Film, Issue 620

Mickey Rourke: The Wrestler

I’ve had a poster of Mickey Rourke on my wall for over 20 years now. A black and white blow-up from Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, it pictures Rourke as private detective Harry Angel, freshly demobbed after WWII, his hair back-combed into an untidy quiff…

Slumdog Millionaire

ROMANCE/DRAMA Adapted by Simon Beaufoy from Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A this winning story of a Mumbai street urchin (Skins’ Dev Patel) who makes it to the final round of India’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? might well be the film that…

Julia

THRILLER/DRAMA What begins as a grim character study of a middle-aged alcoholic becomes a blackly funny crime caper/road movie. Tilda Swinton is in ferocious good form as the titular 40-year-old drunk, a woman whose natural good looks and flamboyant…

Preview 2009 - Danny Boyle

It’s not uncommon for the films that turn out to be the best of any given year to have been released at the beginning of that year. Think of Lust, Caution, No Country for Old Men, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Juno and There Will be Blood – all…

Preview 2009 - Film

There are three years to go until the end of the world, according to Mayan prophecies and it seems filmmakers can’t stop looking back to look forward. Let’s start at the beginning of the year when the 1978 assassination of Harvey Milk, civil rights…

Preview 2009 - Local talent

MUSIC: The Phantom Band We’ve been tipping this Glasgow sextet, who make what’s most succinctly described as ‘experimental krautrock’, for greatness for a wee while now. Their debut album Checkmate Savage lands in late January, fresh off the Chemikal…

The Wrestler

DRAMA/SPORT ‘What happened, did the price of tights go up?’ a sneering store-manager taunts Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson (Mickey Rourke) when the impoverished wrestling star comes looking for work. Fighting a losing battle with his own finances, Randy…

Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Arta Dobroshi

So what’s their secret? In film after film Belgian filmmakers the Dardenne brothers have cast unknown actors and elicited powerfully naturalistic performances from them: think of Jérémie Renier in La Promesse, Emilie Dequenne in Rosetta, Morgan Marinne…

Fighters •••• & Real Money •••

SPORT/BOX SET Ron Peck’s 1991 documentary on boxing is a romantic, idealised, even sentimental portrayal of a sport often denounced as brutal and barbaric. Die-hard lovers of boisterous fight night atmosphere may be baffled: any action in the ring…

The Man From London

DRAMA/MYSTERY Given Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s penchant for prolonged gloomy probings into the nature of human existence (see his 450-minute Satan’s Tango), this adaptation of a lesser-known novel by Belgian crime writer Georges Simenon would…

Defiance

DRAMA/WAR The suggestion in Knocked Up that Steven Spielberg’s Munich was ‘Rambo for Jews’ seems to have inspired Edward Zwick’s latest project. After military epics Glory and The Last Samurai, Zwick arrives at the remarkable true story of the…

Beverly Hills Chihuahua

COMEDY/ADVENTURE The gritty, seedy world of Mexican dog fighting evoked in Amores Perros is (unsurprisingly) entirely missing from this brightly-lit family comedy from Raja Gosnell, the auteur behind Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. Beverly…

Seven Pounds

DRAMA Will Smith is the most bankable star in America. Last year the mediocre I Am Legend opened with a whopping $77 million in its first weekend. Hancock rang tills this summer to the tune of $62 million. However, both those films operated in strong…

Paris Blues

DRAMA The late Paul Newman is jazz performer Ram Bowen in this laidback drama of left bank insouciance from 1964, directed by Martin Hud Ritt. Ram hangs out in Paris with fellow American musician Eddie Cook (Sidney Poitier). They meet a couple of…

Sakuran

MANGA ADAPTATION A bit like Edinburgh’s number 30 bus, Mika Ninagawa’s adaptation of this noted Manga comic series by Moyoco Anno travels an epic, seemingly endless journey, but goes nowhere interesting on the way. The scenery is better though, with…

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…

Tall Headlines

DRAMA Good show Odeon Entertainment for premiering on DVD a series of forgotten British films from the post-war period. They’re not exactly lost classics, but as the 1952 melodrama Tall Headlines illustrates, these films are certainly decent enough…

Gaelic film festival announced as part of Celtic Connections

Film companies Craic and MG ALBA have announced details of an all Gaelic film festival to be held between 22–24 Jan at the CCA in Glasgow, presented as part of this year’s Celtic Connections festival. Held over three days, the festival will showcase…