Film, Issue 698

Here, Then and One Mile Away honoured at EIFF 2012 awards

Penny Woolcock, Andrea Riseborough and Brid Brennan among the winners

The 66th EIFF awards took place at the Filmhouse cinema on Saturday, with Mao Mao’s Here, Then and Penny Woolcock‘s One Mile Away among the films honoured. Here, Then was declared Best International Feature Film by an illustrious jury, including…

God Bless America

Dark satire from comedian Bobcat Goldthwait about an oddball duo who embark on a killing spree

Ironically titled but sincerely intended, God Bless America is a comedy drama about ‘going postal’. Boiling with rage at society’s ills are two avenging oddballs; they’re Bonnie and Clyde for anyone tired of being reduced to a mere consumer. From…

Q&A: Arab Strap singer Aidan Moffat chats to Gregory's Girl's Colin Tully

The 2012 SAY award winner talks to saxman and composer of Glasgow's cult 80s classic before one-off

Aidan Moffat: How did you come to work with Bill Forsyth? I know you worked on his first film, That Sinking Feeling – had you known each other beforehand? Colin Tully: Can't say I knew Bill well before That Sinking Feeling. His…

The Amazing Spider-Man

Marc Webb breathes new life into this Marvel comic favourite

Originally envisaged as the fourth film in the Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire franchise, The Amazing Spider-Man became a re-boot once those two names departed. Rather than a weak imitation however, incoming director Marc Webb succeeds in breathing new life…

Gregory La Cava Retrospective

A look at the glamour, irreverence and eccentricity of the under-appreciated Hollywood director

It’s touching somehow that Nora Ephron’s sad death coincided with the arrival of a Gregory La Cava retrospective at EIFF and Filmhouse. His masterworks of screwball action and improvised banter occupy just the sort of eternal Old Hollywood cocktail hour…

Five things you didn't know about the Edinburgh International Film Festival

Five fun facts featuring John Huston, Bill Forsyth and Barry Norman

‘The Only Festival Worth A Damn’ EIFF is rightly proud of this tribute by John Huston, made in 1972 when he brought Fat City to the festival. But he had a debt to repay. Houston had attended Edinburgh in 1954, an uncongenial two day visit characterised…

Differently, Molussia

Stories of the paradoxical and obscure, inspired by extracts from an unpublished Gunther Anders book

Differently, Molussia is a 16mm film made up of nine short segments that with each screening are shown in a different order. There are only three prints available: one subtitled in English, one subtitled in French and one in the original German: the…

Anton Corbijn: Inside Out

Insubstantial documentary about the photographer and filmmaker

Early in this all-too reverent and ponderous documentary it becomes apparent that the man at its centre is not as fascinating an interview subject as director Klaartje Quirijns believes. Dutch photographer – and more recently film director – Anton…

Berberian Sound Studio

Striking and unsettling film from Peter Strickland set in a 1970s Italian horror sound studio

Films that address the artifice, fakery and manipulation inherent in their own medium obviously offer geeky thrills for knowing buffs, but they also draw out the intriguing emotional complexity of the filmmaker/viewer relationship: the fact that we…

California Solo

Robert Carlyle gives a fine performance as a washed up Britpop musician forced to face his demons

Screenwriter and director Marshall Lewy apparently wrote the role of burnt-out Scottish rock guitarist and former star of the nineties Britpop music scene Lachlan MacAldonich specifically for his leading man Robert Carlyle. It’s certainly a canny…

Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie

The comic duo’s first film is a brutal satire of Hollywood but sadly lacks laughs

Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie is perhaps the worst comedy since Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered. Like Freddy, Billion Dollar Movie features a cult TV comedy act directing a feature film for the first time, and going overboard with bad taste…

V/H/S

A thoroughly nasty series of handheld horror vignettes

Using ‘found footage’ as its central theme, V/H/S delivers six different stories for the price of one. In the overarching narrative ‘Tape 56’, a group of thugs raid a seemingly empty house in search of a specific video cassette, filming their actions as…

Day of the Flowers

Likeable but uneven drama about two Scottish sisters in Cuba

This light drama about family uniquely connects Glasgow and Cuba through its story of chalk and cheese sisters Rosa (Eva Birthistle) and Ailie (Charity Wakefield), the former an anti-capitalist activist, the latter a materialistic party girl, who steal…

Brave

Beautifully realised Scottish-set animation from Pixar, featuring Kelly Macdonald and Emma Thompson

Historians might chafe at the vague approximation of medieval clan politics, and linguists query the anachronistic slang, but on the whole you’d have to be a paranoid curmudgeon indeed to take offence at this much-vaunted trip to Scotland by Pixar…

Niño

Idiosyncratic Philippine drama about an aristocratic family in decline

This portrait of an aristocratic Philippine family in decline combines the weighty thematic concerns of Chekhov with the heightened melodramatic performance style of daytime television soap operas. When Gaspar, the elderly family patriarch and former…

Revisiting: The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie

Re-issue of surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s scathing satire on the ruling elite

A 40th anniversary re-issue for Luis Buñuel’s penultimate film, a brilliant comedy of manners, in which half-a-dozen bourgeois folk, including a pair of middle-aged married couples, a younger female relative, and an ambassador of a fictional South…

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012 Day Planner

Day-by-day highlights of the 2012 EIFF

List film editor Gail Tolley selects the highlights of this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. You can catch every one of these films in the order they’re listed.

Gaspar Noe on 7 Days in Havana - interview

The French provocateur is one of seven directors contributing to the film

One of the highlights of this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, 7 Days In Havana, is an anthology movie set around the Cuban capital, inspired by the likes of Paris je t’aime and New York, I Love You. As the title suggests, seven filmmakers…

What is This Film Called Love?

Mark Cousins’ charming, witty and very personal film about travel, film and Mexico City

Filmmaker, broadcaster, writer, former EIFF artistic director and the festival’s latest patron Mark Cousins’ new film is a supreme piece of self-indulgence. Finding himself grounded in Mexico City for three days, Cousins, who by his own admission can’t…

Chilling at T in the Park

Don’t hit the eject button just yet. There is more to T in the Park than the moshpit, and loads of other non-musical activities and events have been organised too. Thursday-night campers can ease themselves into the weekend by taking in a film on the…

Lovely Molly

New horror from the Blair Witch director has brilliant atmosphere but a slender plot

Having one game-changing mega-hit can of course trouble a director’s career as much as aiding it, and Eduardo Sánchez isn’t pretending that he’s not still haunted by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project. Lovely Molly commences with a shot of a young woman…

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Disappointing apocalyptic romcom starring Steve Carell and Keira Knightley

The directorial debut from Lorene Scafaria (writer of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist) begins with the announcement that the final mission to save the Earth from obliteration by an asteroid has failed. Initially it’s hilariously cynical as, with just…

Review of Reviews - Prometheus

What we said, and they said, about Ridley Scott's return to the Alien universe

What we said ‘For all its newness, Prometheus feels oddly second hand. Inescapably, the film operates as a set of such discrete moments, rather than a fully-realised narrative.’ The List They said ‘For all its big ideas it’s not quite as revelatory…

Philippine New Wave: This is Not A Film Movement

An illustrated oral history of the vibrant Philippine independent filmmaking scene

If you’re looking for an introduction to the largest – and, arguably, the most exciting – of the several new sections introduced into the EIFF programme this year by debuting artistic director Chris Fujiwara, you could do no worse than take check out…

The Ambassador

Intriguing exposé on corruption in African business and politics

The Ambassador follows Danish documentarian Mads Brügger as he navigates his way through the blood diamond trade and the political systems that facilitate it. After purchasing a diplomatic passport declaring him an ambassador for the West African nation…