Film, Musical

Les Misérables

A strong cast with good singing voices lift up Tom Hooper's French Revolution musical adap

The musical is a taste that, once acquired, tends to stick. Fall for South Pacific or Evita or The Rocky Horror Picture Show at an impressionable age, and your crush is likely to outlast far more credible affiliations. Conversely, if you never got your…

Pitch Perfect

A surprisingly smart take on the potentially clichéd 'songs & starlets' material

While the Glee concert movie proved to be a surprise flop last year, the idea of packaging up chart songs and glamorous teenage starlets has been a Hollywood trope since the advent of sound. The latest effort, Pitch Perfect, is a simple enough piece of…

Where Do We Go Now?

A mix of drama, comedy and musical numbers from Lebanese auteur Nadine Labaki

Lebanese director Nadine Labaki’s debut Caramel was an excellent slice-of-life comedy that offered a human and humorous perspective on contemporary life in Beirut. For her second film she takes ambitious leaps on all fronts, mixing intense drama, broad…

Rock of Ages

Camp and frequently bizarre 80s-set musical with an all-star cast

With its campometer cranked up to eleven, Rock of Ages is Mamma Mia! in a mullet. This maniacal jukebox musical is based on Chris D’Arienzo’s Broadway and West End hit and features a star cast jettisoning their dignity to sing for their supper. Adam…

Beloved

A sprawling, messy epic on unrequited love from French director Christophe Honoré

Christophe Honoré's Love Songs (2007) established a talent for musical melodrama that eschewed all the traditional razzle-dazzle trappings of Hollywood. Characters break into song as they casually stroll down a city street and the often banal…

Elle Fanning to star in film adaptation of Stuart Murdoch's God Help the Girl

Glasgow-set musical to commence filming in June

When Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch created God Help the Girl back in 2009, he knew that he was writing a 60s girl-group soundtrack for a film that didn't yet exist. Now, after years of fund-raising and producing, a film adaptation of the album…

GFF 2012 - Day planner

Our highlights for each day of the Glasgow Film Festival

It can be difficult, when any festival rolls around, to decide which events to skip in favour of others. Searching rigorously through the programme, referring back to the calendar, trying to fit in as much as possible - it's a painstaking piece of work…

Glasgow Film Festival: Why I love Gene Kelly

Miles Fielder makes a song and dance about the charismatic movie star

For a film lover who hates musicals (this writer), the GFF’s Gene Kelly retrospective ought to be a hard sell. Telling stories through song and dance, Kelly’s forte (the latter of which endeavours earned him a special Oscar in 1951), is anathema to this…

Andrzej Zulawski's cult horror hybrid Possession released on DVD

It certainly ranks as one of the most surreal moments in my life. I’m sitting in a Polish restaurant, having dinner (before a scheduled Q&A at the Filmhouse) with one of my all time favourite film directors, who is standing behind me, giving me a…

Can't Stop The Music

(PG) 118min (Optimum) This fictional Village People biopic/musical was released in 1980, and flopped dramatically at the box office, winning ‘Worst Picture’ at the first Golden Raspberry Awards. Blame it on America’s lack of tolerance at the…

Toy Story 3 and The Illusionist among Edinburgh International Film Festival 2010 highlights

With The Edinburgh Film Festival 2010, which runs between 16-27 June, only a matter of weeks away, the red carpets are getting waterproofed and the popcorn machines are getting serviced. Now in its 64th year, the twelve day festival, packed with…

The Kreutzer Sonata

(18) 99min Having discarded cumbersome period trappings for his superb, stripped down, contemporary Los Angeles-set Tolstoy adaptation Ivansxtc, writer/director Bernard Rose does the same with another story by the Russian master, the second in a…

Hipsters, Bad Lieutenant and a Frightfest at GFF

Glasgow Film Festival blog

Friday afternoon. I decide to brave the vertiginous screens at Glasgow’s Cineworld Renfrew Street where some festival films are also showing. I make the perverse choice of Hipsters, a Russian film with no current UK distributor about a group of post…

Chess in Concert

Video footage of the Abba/Tim Rice musical

Filmed performance of the blokes from Abba and Tim Rice’s musical about the sex lives of chess players. (It’s actually slightly more complicated than that, but who cares really?) Filmed at the Royal Albert Hall in 2008 with a full orchestra and chorus…

Bandslam

Todd Graff's take on the teenage rock star dream

‘This is sick!’ says budding impresario Will Burton (Gaelan Connell) as he constructs a rock’n’roll band from his fellow high school students to take part in a battle-of-the-bands competition. The description ‘sick’, obviously meaning, that his band are…

Meet Danny Wilson

This lesser known 1951 Frank Sinatra film was made at the time his career had stalled, two years after his only role of note at that point, in the Gene Kelly musical On the Town, and two years before he won an Oscar for From Here to Eternity, the film…

Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience

(U) 75min New Jersey’s most popular rockers get the 3D concert treatment. No, sadly this isn’t The Boss and his E Street Band in all their blue collar glory, but Disney Channel-derived band the Jonas Brothers – a power pop threesome who make the…

Interview: Repo's Darren Lynn Bousman and Terrance Zdunich

Repo: The Genetic Opera is a truly unique film mixing rock opera with lashings of gore and dark sci-fi. Set in a world where transplanted organs are repossessed if you fail to meet your payments. Director Darren Lynn Bousman (who also directed Saw II…

Edith Piaf: Le Concert Ideal/The Documentary

(E) 110min (Acorn DVD retail) MUSIC/BOXSET The life of legendary chanteuse Edith Piaf was the stuff of melodrama, which, along with her incredible talents, accounts for her enduring appeal and status as a kind of deity in her native France. The…

The Ruling Class

COMEDY/MUSICAL Olivier Award-winning dramatist Peter Barnes’ adaptation of his own acclaimed play, directed for the screen in 1972 by Hungarian émigré Peter Medak (The Krays, Let Him Have It), was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes and secured…

Film - Also Released

White Christmas (U) 120min New digital print of this Christmas staple. GFT, Glasgow and Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Fri 12-Wed 24 Dec. North Face (12A) 121min Exciting historical adventure recounting the dangerous ascent of the Eiger in 1936 by two…

Summer scoops top prize at Bafta Scotland awards

Summer, Grand Theft Auto, Gary’s Wrr and Lorraine Kelly were amongst the winners last night at the Lloyds TSB BAFTA Scotland Awards. The ceremony, at Glasgow’s City Halls with an audience of over 800, was broadcast live online worldwide.

Lou Reed's Berlin

CONCERT MOVIE (12A) 85min In 1973, Lou Reed was primed for a stellar pop career, following up the success of Transformer’s glam pop thrills with Berlin, an ambitious rock opera showcasing Reed’s versatile capabilities. But Berlin tanked, both…

Also Released - Film

Leatherheads (PG) 113min •• Directed by and starring George Clooney, Leatherheads is a wannabe Preston Sturges-style romantic comedy set against the backdrop of the burgeoning American football league in 1925. Dodge Connolly (Clooney) is a cocky but…