Film, Reviews and Paul Dale

Blood In The Mobile

Documentary explores mineral extraction in Eastern DR Congo for use in phone handsets

9 Nov 2011

(12A) 85min The mobile phone, that universal symbol of convenience and progress, comes at quite a price. We are not talking fiscal here, we are talking of a price above rubies, a cost measured in blood, sweat and tears. All mobile phones contain…

The Help

Oscar-bait portayal of the civil rights struggle in the Deep South

17 Oct 2011

(12A) 146min As Lee Hazlewood wrote in his musical paean to the nihilistic life: ‘Honey, I’m gonna snowball Jackson. See if I care.’ He needn’t have bothered, someone already had. A white American baby boom in the Deep South in the 1950s had taken…

Melancholia

Lars von Trier's sci-fi drama features star turns from Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg

21 Sep 2011

(15) 135min Melancholia is like the inversion of TS Elliot’s much quoted dictum. Is this how the world will end? With a bang not a whimper. Lars Von Trier’s curious, enigmatic and deterministic film seeks to equate the black dog of depression with an…

Tyrannosaur

Paddy Considine's directorial debut features strong performances from Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman

21 Sep 2011

(18) 92min Unemployed widower, drunk and all-round angry old man Joseph (Peter Mullan) stumbles into the council estate charity shop minded by good Samaritan volunteer Hannah (Olivia Colman), and friendship follows initial hostility. Despite her…

Red, White and Blue

Grimly progressive horror/thriller strips away cliché that surrounds the genres

19 Sep 2011

(18) 103min Erica (Amanda Fuller) is not a good girl. She’s promiscuous but dispassionate, nihilistic but emotionless. The girl’s clearly got some issues. The only person who manages to make any kind of non-sexual connection is weirdy beardy Nate…

Drive

16 Sep 2011

(18) 100min You should never drive faster than your guardian angel can fly. If only Ryan Gosling’s Hollywood stuntman/ getaway driver had heeded this advice he might not have got mixed up with beautiful mum Irene (Carey Mullighan), her jailbird beau…

Crazy, Stupid, Love

Interesting observational comedy smothered by rom-com farce and sentimentality

16 Sep 2011

(12A) 118min Suburbia, modern day. Emily (Julianne Moore) tells husband Cal (Steve Carell) that she wants a divorce. Cal agrees to move and hits the local bar. After a period of drunken self-pity, local lothario Jacob (Ryan Gosling) takes him under…

Post Mortem

Powerful sophomore feature based on 1970s Chilean politics

23 Aug 2011

(15) 97min It’s 1973 and work on President Salvador Allende’s ‘Chilean Path to Socialism’ is about to be brought to an abrupt halt by a Chilean military coup. Mario (Alfredo Castro) works for the Santiago morgue as a typist. Quiet, efficient, Mario…

The Hedgehog (Le Herisson)

Smart and faithful adaptation of Muriel Barbery's best-selling book

23 Aug 2011

(12A) 99min There’s no demographic quite like the French bourgeoisie. Their revolution may as well not have happened, Gustav Flaubert pretty much summed things up when he wrote: ‘The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level…

The Qatsi trilogy at the 2011 Edinburgh International Festival

Godfrey Reggio's film trilogy with Philip Glass Ensemble live score is a masterpiece

15 Aug 2011

It’s been twenty-eight years since I saw Koyaanisqatsi, twenty-odd since I saw Powaqqatsi, and almost a decade since Naqoyqatsi. The first two I saw in empty art house cinemas on wet afternoons, I watched the third in a somnambulistic state from my sofa…

Elite Squad 2 - The Enemy Within (Tropa de Elite: O Inimigo Agora e Outro)

Returns to Rio's criminal world with pace, plot and violent set pieces

9 Aug 2011

(18) 114min Returning to the favela killing fields of his reactionary 2008 thriller, the schizophrenically talented writer/director Jose Padilha (Bus 174, Garapa) resurrects Captain Nascimento, but this time the right wing, law and order sympathies…

A Better Life

Chris Weitz's immigration drama is admirable but predictable

21 Jul 2011

(12A) 97min There’s no denying American comedian Pat Paulsen’s dictum that the problems the United States faces today can be traced to the American Indian’s slack immigration policy. A Better Life is the mainstream cinemagoing public’s worst…

The Guard

Regrettable, cliché-ridden tale is entirely forgettable

21 Jun 2011

(15) 96min Don’t you just love the Irish? They’re cultured, funny, nihilistic and big-hearted. They can be naughty, but they love their mammies and they are always up for the craic. OK let’s not beat about the Gaelic bush here, The Guard, written…

Bobby Fischer Against The World

Lovingly realised documentary on American chess master

21 Jun 2011

(12A) 93min Bobby Fischer was the greatest of all past chess masters, and certainly the best America has ever had. Like most geniuses, however, Fischer’s life was a bizarre trajectory of success, fame, delusion and ultimately (possibly) madness.

Books on cinema - round-up

How the Movie Brats Took Over Edinburgh, Tough Without A Gun, The Faber Book of French Cinema

23 May 2011

As is always the way in Scotland, summer is kind of here, and now is the time to lie in the grass with that growing pile of tosh novels. But let’s face it, you are going to win a lot more kudos from your film-obsessed mates if you create a tower of…

The Pipe

Risteard O’Domhnaill's stirring documentary shows a community's fight against big business

23 May 2011

(12A) 83min In 1996 natural gas was discovered off the west coast of Ireland. Shortly afterwards, Shell UK announced plans to run a pipe through the waters and land of Rossport in County Mayo to an inland refinery. Risteard O’Domhnaill’s remarkable…

Takeshi Miike's 13 Assassins strikes a balance between measured character development and violent brutality

25 Apr 2011

(15) 126min Prolific to the point of insanity, unpredictable and blatantly controversial, Takeshi Miike is not your average Japanese filmmaker. His notorious body of work which includes loads of straight to video fare, the Dead or Alive trilogy, Ichi…

Sue Bourne's Irish Dancing documentary Jig fails to excite

25 Apr 2011

(PG) 97min A year on from being named one of the UK’s top ten directors by Broadcast magazine, documentary filmmaker Sue Bourne would seem to actually be obeying the law of diminishing returns. Her last film for Channel 4’s Cutting Edge series The…

Farewell (L'Affaire Farewell) - a romantic thriller set in the midst of the Cold War

Starring Emir Kusterica and Guilliame Canet

28 Mar 2011

(12A) 113min Based loosely on the actions of high ranking KGB official and spy Vladimir Vetrov, Farewell is a complex but tender portrait of the Cold War in free fall, a place where a passionate eccentric like Vetrov (here renamed Grigoriev) can…

Tindersticks: Claire Denis Scores 1996–2009

Excellent anthology of film scores from the French filmmaker and regular collaborator Stuart Staples

21 Mar 2011

(Constellation) This five-disc boxset containing six film scores are testament to the remarkable collaboration between French filmmaker Claire Denis, arguably the most intellectually fertile auteur working today, and Tindersticks bandleader Stuart A…

Fair Game

Thriller based on a true story, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts

2 Mar 2011

(12A) 107min The CIA leak that effectively ended CIA operative Valerie Plame’s career, and the subsequent fallout that revealed a line of corruption leading all the way from Republican low-lives Karl Rove and 'Scooter' Libby to the Whitehouse…

Benda Bilili!

A documentary on the Congolese rhythm'n'blues band Staff Benda Bilili

2 Mar 2011

Kinshasa is the largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s rated as one of the most dangerous cities in the world in terms of crime with a spiraling homeless problem that includes over 20,000 children under the age of 18 living rough…

Get Low - Slow burn storytelling of character organising own ‘living funeral’

Film is too thin despite great performances from Robert Duvall, Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek

19 Jan 2011

(PG) 103min George W Bush aside, was there ever a greater master of malapropism than gifted American baseball player Yogi Berra? He once noted that: ‘You should always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise, they won’t come to yours.’ Round about…

Genius Within: The Inner Life Of Glenn Gould

Film of archive material untangles the the life of Canadian pianist

18 Jan 2011

(U) 108min What a deliriously nutty double bill this film would make alongside Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, François Girard’s schematic but pleasingly conceptual project completed in 1993. Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont’s feature…

Private Road

12 Jan 2011

(15) 89min (BFI) Barney Platts-Mills’ 1971 film is undoubtedly one of the great lost British masterpieces of the 1970s. Platts-Mills was a filmmaker whose previous cult film Bronco Bullfrog had taken a knife to the frothy London set cinema of the…