Film, Issue 631

EIFF 2009 - Fish Tank

Andrea Arnold is a director who likes to work on instinct. She makes films that are defined by their acute observation of real lives rather than informed by a movie buff’s love affair with cinema. The point is underlined at the Cannes launch of her new…

EIFF 2009 - Roger Corman

The Hollywood legend Roger Corman is guest of honour at the 63rd EIFF, which is this year hosting a very welcome retrospective dedicated to the man they rightly call the king of the Bs. Given the 83-year-old auteur has written, directed and/or produced…

EIFF 2009 - Peter McDougall and John Mackenzie

Poor, white, Protestant and on the run from Greenock’s shipyards, Peter McDougall may not have possessed the background to execute the first two Reithian tenets of public service and probity, but he certainly knew about universality. The mythology goes…

EIFF 2009 - Mark Kermode

What are your thoughts on the EIFF? My line has always been that Edinburgh is like Cannes only civilised. Cannes is horrible, genuinely horrible. It’s completely the wrong culture to watch films; it’s a hideous broiling Riviera full of incredibly rich…

EIFF 2009 - Wide Open Spaces

Wide Open Spaces was a co-production between the UK and Ireland. I raised the money from the UK end. Co-productions are becoming much more important for any producer, really just in order to raise enough money to make films. Normally it’s difficult to…

The Clyde: Films of the River 1912–1971

As a new exhibition celebrating the River Clyde, as seen through amateur and professional films opens, Paul Dale salutes Glasgow’s cine-camera chroniclers.

Refugee Week Scotland 2009 - Fugee la la

Given the recent increase in profile of the BNP across Scotland, the timing and focus of this year’s country-wide Refugee Week are particularly prescient. This year, the multi-artform festival which aims to raise awareness of the issues facing and…

Buying films on VHS Special

Never mind uploads, downloads, video on demand or any of today’s new fangled methods of seeing films; the cheapest way to see film must be the good, old-fashioned charity shop. With many shops offering five tapes for £1, the credit crunch is an ideal…

Sugar

DRAMA Premier Baseball’s Latin American slave trade route and the immigrant experience go under the microscope in this offbeat and compelling character study from the makers of 2006’s Half Nelson. Miguel Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) aka Sugar is a…

The Hangover

COMEDY It’s worth toasting The Hangover as one of the Hollywood comedies of the year. Todd Phillips’ film is a buddy movie that really delivers with its riotous cocktail of memorable characters, outrageous situations and explicit humour. Two days…

London in the Raw/Primitive London

DOCUMENTARY The British Film Institute launches its DVD strand Flipside with a pair of salacious dirty delights that certainly fulfil the mandate of the highbrow organisation to rediscover and reappraise overlooked and marginalised material.

Gardens in Autumn

Anyone who’s seen Monday Morning by the Georgian Otar Iosseliani will know he is a filmmaker with a great sense of drift. He’s not interested in plot, but great on spatial texture, ably explored by the great cameraman William Lubtchansky. In Monday…

Alexandra

Few filmmakers do melancholic intimacy better than Alexander Sokurov. Maybe it has to do with his fascination with capturing vulnerability and the presence of death, exemplified by Taurus (about the dying Lenin) and Mother and Son (where a mother passes…

Looking for Eric

COMEDY/DRAMA Could Ken Loach finally be mellowing in his eighth decade? For years the socialist director has been British cinema’s most consistently political filmmaker, illuminating how the dreams of his working class characters are inevitably…

EIFF 2009 - Moon

When Duncan Jones, aka Zowie Bowie, David’s son, premiered his film-directing debut, Moon, at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the critical reception to his cerebral science fiction thriller was ecstatic. Reviewers wasted no time in comparing Moon…

EIFF 2009 - All Tomorrow’s Parties

For those who count themselves among its regular crowd, the feeling is that once you’ve been to All Tomorrow’s Parties you can’t go back to just any old festival. Currently held in a Butlin’s holiday camp at Minehead, Somerset, the tri-annual weekend…

LGBT at the Edinburgh International Film Festival

As ever, the Edinburgh International Film Festival’s ten-day showcase of screenings, talks, interviews and special events, there’s a decent sprinkling of films that are of particular interest to those of an LGBT persuasion. Those interested in a…

The End of the Line

DOCUMENTARY In Rupert Murray’s documentary about the depletion of fish stocks in our oceans, scientists mention that the decline of cod and other predators due to over-fishing has led to a proliferation of lobster, prawn and shrimp – the very…

Gigantic

ROMANCE/COMEDY Having done morose to such great comic effect as a mute Goth kid in Little Miss Sunshine and zealous to fine dramatic impact as the phoney preacher in There Will Be Blood, boyishly good looking American actor Paul Dano graduates from…

Red Cliff

Asian action auteur-turned-Hollywood hired hand John Woo hasn’t directed a film since 2003 thriller Paycheck. And Woo hasn’t been home to China to make a movie since 1992. Back behind the camera, Woo’s first Chinese film in almost 20 years is a…

Jordan Baseman & Henna-Riikka Halonen: Commonwealth Suite

FILM On the high diving board at the Commonwealth Pool weeks before the civic amenity built for the 1970 Commonwealth Games closes for refurbishment, junior members of Edinburgh Diving Club are showing off their air-to-water gymnastic skills. As a…

New Town Killers

Richard Jobson’s Edinburgh-set credit crunch thriller is the best film and certainly his most commercial since his impressive 2003 debut 16 Years of Alcohol. As he did with that film, Jobson makes inventive use of the city he calls home, shooting in the…

Blue Eyelids (Parpados Azules)

Love, naivety and loneliness in a modern Mexican megalopolis are essayed in this charming and quirky bittersweet comedy. When factory worker Marina (Cecilia Suárez) wins an all-expenses-paid trip for two from her employer, she realises that, because of…

Miss March

COMEDY 20th Century Fox’s recent decision to abandon their Fox Atomic subsidiary stemmed from the failure of such ghastly teenage fare as The Rocker and Miss March. This leaden buddy comedy features Eugene (Zach Cregger) and Tucker (Trevor Moore…

Little Ashes

‘No Rules. No Regrets. No Returns’ promise the breathless ads for Paul Wondrous Oblivion Morrison’s homage to the Catalonian spirit, detailing the relationships between three of Spain’s greatest creative temperaments, notably playwright and poet…