Film

Mickey Rourke: The Wrestler

8 Jan 2009

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…

Julia

8 Jan 2009

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…

Slumdog Millionaire

8 Jan 2009

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…

Preview 2009 - Danny Boyle

8 Jan 2009

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

8 Jan 2009

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

8 Jan 2009

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

8 Jan 2009

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…

Also Released - Film

8 Jan 2009

Bride Wars (PG) 90min ••• Bridezilla comedy pitting Anne Hathaway against Kate Hudson from the makers of Ugly Betty and Lipstick Jungle. There’s a few good jokes and set pieces but this is ultimately a girl’s flick that never quite makes it down the…

Beverly Hills Chihuahua

8 Jan 2009

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…

Defiance

8 Jan 2009

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…

DVD Round-Up

8 Jan 2009

It’s January and the party is over. Months of belt-tightening and couch surfing lay ahead for those of us bankrupted by seasonal (or more international financial) excess. But let’s keep in mind Jean-Paul Sartre’s eulogy that ‘to read a poem in January…

Fighters •••• & Real Money •••

8 Jan 2009

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…

Gaelic film festival announced as part of Celtic Connections

8 Jan 2009

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…

Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Arta Dobroshi

8 Jan 2009

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…

Paris Blues

8 Jan 2009

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

8 Jan 2009

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…

Seven Pounds

8 Jan 2009

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…

Sex Drive

8 Jan 2009

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

8 Jan 2009

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…

The Man From London

8 Jan 2009

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…

Calling all List readers

The Richard Attenborough Film Awards

5 Jan 2009

Before we look forward to 2009, we want List readers to look back to their favourite films of yesteryear, well 2008 anyway. The List has joined the prestigious Richard Attenborough Film Awards (RAFAs) to create an all new readers poll for the best Film…

Audio: Fear in Lothian - Special effect exhibition

19 Dec 2008

Audio: Calum MacDonald talks to Paul Dale Download MP3: Audio: Calum MacDonald talks to Paul Dale . Fear in Lothian is an exhibition in The Cameo Cinema bar, Edinburgh which showcases some of the the models used…

Arabian Nights

Middle East International Film Festival

15 Dec 2008

What follows is a short blog by Zainab Al Hassani who went to this year's Middle East International Film Festival, which took place between 10-19 October 2008 in Abu Dhabi.

The Hot 100 2008

11 Dec 2008

It’s been a helluva year. 2008 has been a time of significant global change, socially, politically and culturally, with Scotland no exception. So here, for your delectation, is The List’s pick of the 100 people, places and things that rocked our world…

Australia

11 Dec 2008

(12A) 165min Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom, Romeo & Juliet and Moulin Rouge) gets more and more ambitious with each film he makes. With it’s sweeping vistas, debt to Gone With the Wind, World War II backdrop and romantic pairing of Nicole…

Boyle tipped for Oscar win for Slumdog Millionaire

11 Dec 2008

Adopted as one of our local heroes, Danny Boyle helped put Scotland on the Cool Britannia map with his witty, stark portrayal of heroin addicts in 1996 film, Trainspotting. Now, with such well-received silver screen successes as The Beach and 28 Days…

Che: Part One

11 Dec 2008

(15) 126min At Cannes, Steven Soderbergh’s diptych of films about Che Guevara were shown consecutively, but British audiences are being asked to spend a month pondering The Argentine (original title) before we see Guerrilla (part two) – a wise move…

Far North

11 Dec 2008

(15) 89min After an auspicious debut with The Warrior, writer-director Asif Kapadia went to Hollywood with disastrous results in the form of super-lame Sarah Michelle Gellar horror flick The Return. Adapted from the short story True North by Sara…

Film - Also Released

11 Dec 2008

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…

Film books round-Up

11 Dec 2008

‘Tis the season to settle down with a good old-fashioned film book. Having a stack of cinema related tomes on your bedside table is essential for any aspiring cineaste at this time of year. So after many hours of sifting through recent releases this is…

Frank Miller interview

11 Dec 2008

‘At first I found it too daunting, because Will Eisner had been my mentor. But after three minutes of careful thought I decided that nobody else could touch it. So I went from protecting The Spirit to exploring what I perceived as Will’s intent, which…

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S Thompson

11 Dec 2008

(15) 119min Alex Gibney’s informative new documentary about the photojournalist and socio-political chronicler’s turbulent life and work obviously involved a lot of extra-curricular activity. Mapping Thompson’s trajectory from Twain and…

I'm Not Rappaport

11 Dec 2008

(12) 129 min There’s a quiet, mirthful kind of charm to Herb Gardner’s Broadway hit of 1985, here transposed to the screen in this 1996 version directed by the writer. It tells the story of two old men who meet in Central Park on a daily basis, one…

Inkheart

11 Dec 2008

(PG) 106min Christmas may not have been cancelled, but the withdrawal of the latest Harry Potter instalment left a gaping hole in the festive cinema schedules, with Iain Backbeat Softley’s long-shelved adaptation of Cornelia Funke’s children’s novel…

Lemon Tree

11 Dec 2008

(PG) 106min Based not so much on a single true story as a number of similar real-life events, this powerfully affecting Israeli-German-French drama uses the tale of a battle of wills between a Palestinian widow and an Israel politician as a parable…

Little Dorritt

11 Dec 2008

(U) 380min Released to coincide with the BBC transmission of Andrew Bleak House Davies’ new adaptation of Dickens’ great political novel, Christine Edzard’s low-budget 1987 beauty is an intimate six-hour epic split in two halves. The first focuses…

Mum & Dad

11 Dec 2008

(18) 85min If you appreciate black humour and have a strong stomach there’s much to be admired in Steven Sheil’s low budget British horror. Exploiting the ongoing trend for torture porn, it transports the sadomasochistic splatter-fest of the Hostel…

Role Models

11 Dec 2008

(15) 91min How adults can benefit from relationships with children has been explored cinematically since before Charlie Chaplin met The Kid. One good recent example of this type of story was The School of Rock where Jack Black’s inner-child was…

The Battle of the Somme

11 Dec 2008

(E) 74min Originally released in 1916, right in the middle of World War I, this important documentary might not be known to viewers in its entirety, but individual moments will probably be familiar: its images are regularly ransacked for various…

The Day the Earth Stood Still

11 Dec 2008

(12A) 105min As remakes go, Scott Derrickson’s re-imagining of Robert Wise’s 1951 sci-fi classic The Day The Earth Stood Still has more contemporary resonance than most. By substituting the threat of nuclear war for that posed by global warming, the…

The Guard Post

11 Dec 2008

(18) 120min (Cine Asia) South Korea certainly has a healthy film industry. As the American magazine Film Comment mused when the wave of their films first crashed on American shores – ‘is there actually more bilge than brine in the splash?…

The Reader

11 Dec 2008

(15) 123min In a West German town at the end of the 1950s, 15-year-old Michael (David Kross) starts a passionate affair with Hanna (Kate Winslet), a tram conductor more than twice his age. The relationship is sweet as well as sexually charged…

The Silence of Lorna

11 Dec 2008

(15) 105min Compassionate chroniclers of those struggling to exist on the margins of society, Belgian sibling auteurs Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne return with their first feature to focus on a female protagonist since 1999’S Rosetta. The Lorna of…

The White Planet

11 Dec 2008

(E) 86min French Canadian filmmakers Thierry Piantanida and Jean Lemire’s 2006 documentary attempts to bridge the gap between an National Geographic style infomercial documentaries and the visual ambitiousness (and ambiguities) of more experimental…

To Get to Heaven You Have to Die (Bihisht Faqat Baroi Murdagon)

11 Dec 2008

(15) 95min Tajikistani writer/director Jamshed Usmonov’s macho but engaging, quirky and darkly humourous tale of impotence and mafia initiation is his first since 2002’s equally measured and memorable Angel on the Right. Set, like that film, in and…

Twilight

11 Dec 2008

(12A) 121min ‘I hope you enjoy disappointment,’ murmurs surly vampire-next door Edward (Robert Pattinson) in Catherine Thirteen Hardwicke’s adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s vampire-romance novel, but Twilight is likely to be a matter of extreme…

Audio: It's a Wonderful Life - film panel discussion

10 Dec 2008

The classic film It's A Wonderful Life has, over the decades, become a festive favourite - always getting a cinema screening around Christmas and earning a place in the television schedule. Here, a panel from The List led by Film Editor Paul Dale…

Audio: Interview with film director Kenny Glenaan

4 Dec 2008

You can listen here to an interview with film director Kenny Glenaan conducted by Film Editor of The List Paul Dale. Glenaan's most recent film, Summer is a forceful emotional drama starring Robert Carlyle as a man fixated by his own turbulent…

Missing in action - Angelina Jolie interview

27 Nov 2008

Playing the real-life mother of a missing child in Clint Eastwood’s latest film was an emotionally fraught experience for Angelina Jolie, she tells Rob Carnevale

Illuminations - Shinsuke Ogawa

27 Nov 2008

Illuminations is Filmhouse’s first standalone documentary festival outside of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Programmed by Jenny Leask, a former programmer of the EIFF Document strand, Illuminations aims to screen generically different…

Also Released - Film

27 Nov 2008

Four Christmases (12A) 88min ••• Another year, another Christmas comedy starring Vince Vaughn. This time he’s teamed up with Reese Witherspoon for a likeably silly comedy about divorced parents and the pressure of yuletide family gatherings. It’s…

Año Uña

27 Nov 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE Inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 short La Jetée, the young Mexican writer/director Jonás Cuarón (son of filmmaker Alfonso) has constructed a feature film that consists entirely of still images. Over the course of a year he photographed…

Changeling

27 Nov 2008

CRIME/DRAMA Clint Eastwood’s feel for actors doesn’t desert him in this true story of 1920’s Los Angeles featuring Angelina Jolie in a similar Oscar-baiting vein to her role as Mariane Pearl in Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart. Jolie…

Close Up

27 Nov 2008

PHOTOGRAPHY/FILM ‘Why has not man a microscopic eye? For the plain reason man is not a fly.’ The early 18th century poet Alexander Pope’s wrote that, perhaps in a moment of peevishness. Between Pope’s witticism and writer and critic William Hazlitt’s…

Flawless

27 Nov 2008

HEIST/THRILLER Sometimes diamonds are not a girl’s best friend. It’s London in 1960 and Laura Quinn (Demi Moore) is beginning to realise that her hard won managerial post for the South African owned London Diamond Company may not be as secure as she…

Jennifer Aniston to star opposite Gerard Butler in Goree Girls

27 Nov 2008

Jennifer Aniston is said to be starring opposite Gerard Butler in Goree Girls, a prison movie she is producing. Aniston is said to have approached the Scottish actor after seeing him play opposite Hilary Swank in PS I Love You.

Lakeview Terrace

27 Nov 2008

THRILLER (15) 110min What could be safer than living next door to a cop? Well just about anything if that cop happens to be played by one of America’s leading black actors. Smug young marrieds Chris (Patrick Wilson) and Lisa (Kerry Washington) move…

Madagascar 2: Escape 2 Africa

27 Nov 2008

COMEDY/ANIMATION When Alex the lion (voiced by Ben Stiller), Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith), Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Marty the zebra (Chris Rock) escaped from their Manhattan zoo in 2005 hit Madagascar, they were leaders of…

Nanni Moretti

27 Nov 2008

‘I went to a public reading of the novel Quiet Chaos by the author Sandro Veronesi who I have known for years. Outside the bookshop I happened to bump into a woman from the production company, who told me that they had already bought the rights to turn…

Paul Bettany

27 Nov 2008

Paul Bettany has rediscovered the joy of acting. Over the coming months, he’ll be seen playing a racist peach farmer in America’s Deep South for The Secret Life of Bees and then a royal adviser and future prime minister to Emily Blunt’s queen in The…

Quiet Chaos

27 Nov 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE Nanni Moretti’s 2001 film The Son’s Room explored a middle-class Italian family’s attempt to cope with the unexpected death of a teenage son. Quiet Chaos, which stars and is co-written by Moretti, but is directed by Antonello Grimaldi…

Rivals (Les Liens du Sang)

27 Nov 2008

THRILLER Based on the autobiographical book by Michel and Bruno Papet Deux Frères – Flic & Truand, Rivals is the story of two brothers in late 1970s Lyon, one a cop, the other a criminal. When the impressively moustachioed Gabriel (François Cluzet…

Summer

27 Nov 2008

DRAMA There is no Shakespearean ‘eternal summer’ for Shaun (Robert Carlyle) and Daz (Steve Evets). Shaun looks after wheelchair bound Daz in an impoverished ex-mining community in Derbyshire. Daz is mouthy, bitter and demanding while Shaun is silent…

The Children

27 Nov 2008

HORROR The current fad for evil kiddie chillers – see Ils (Them) from France, Eden Lake from the UK and While She Was Out from the US – continues with another British horror flick in which children do diabolical things to disbelieving adults. As the…

Tilda Swinton to be jury president at Berlin International Film Festival

27 Nov 2008

Oscar winner Tilda Swinton has been announced as the jury president at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. The Oscar-nominated Scottish actress is a Berlinale regular, with 14 of her film screened across Berlin festivals in past years.

Edinburgh College of Art wins at Scottish BAFTAs

19 Nov 2008

Edinburgh College of Art is celebrating success after winning two top awards at the Scottish BAFTAs. Anders Jedenfors and Jaime Stone, two recent graduates from the city's college of art, scooped a Bafta for their work on animation. Sunday night's…

New venue brings downtown New York to Edinburgh

19 Nov 2008

Edinburgh’s art scene has another new addition. The Bowery on Roxburgh Place in the Southside, opened last Saturday and takes its name from one of the famous city's hippest streets. The venue aims to replicate the quirky and semi mod attitude of the…

Porn in the movies

13 Nov 2008

Platonic friends Zack and Miri one day decide that in the current economic climate the only way to diminish their respective personal debts is to make a pornographic film together, but the world of amateur porno filmmaking is not as easy as it seems. So…

Visionless Express - Fernando Meirelles director of Blindness

13 Nov 2008

‘What’s the most challenging thing about making a film about blindness?’ asks Fernando Meirelles, the relentlessly upbeat director of relentlessly downbeat mood-blackeners City of God and The Constant Gardner. ‘Trying to establish relationships between…

Big time - Metro Ecosse film competition

13 Nov 2008

It’s been too long, but you know how it is – one thing leads to another and then it’s Christmas time again. Anyway, the time has come to check up on the progress of the second film competition. To recap – back in December 2006, The List launched Metro’s…

Derren Brown: The Specials

13 Nov 2008

(4DVD) 196min Almost five years ago to the week that Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand were threatened with being burnt at the stake, another witch-hunt was conducted for another man merely seeking to thrill us. In October 2003, Derren Brown asked a…

Also Released - Film

13 Nov 2008

Outlanders (15) 98min ●●● When his father dies, young Pole Adam (Jakub Tolak) sets off to find his older brother Jan, a former football player who was last heard of in England. The journey brings him face to face with the UK itinerant illegal labour…

Body of Lies

13 Nov 2008

(15) 128min As with 2001’s Black Hawk Down, South Shields’ most famous filmmaker Ridley Scott again attempts to pull a callous zeitgeist from international news headlines, with unconvincing results. CIA operative Roger Ferris (Leonardo Di Caprio…

Choke

13 Nov 2008

(18) 92min Unrepentant sex addict Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) has always believed that life is about making other people do stuff for you. By day he does as little work as he can at a historical theme park and by night he cons money in restaurants…

Conversations With My Gardener

13 Nov 2008

(12A) 108min When a successful Parisian painter (Daniel Auteil) returns to the rural childhood home he has inherited in the Rhone-Alps region of southern France, he places an advert for somebody to rejuvenate the property’s unkempt garden. The first…

Max Payne

13 Nov 2008

(15) 99min The film noir influences on the Max Payne video game series made a cinematic outing inevitable, but John Moore’s abortive fantasy-thriller exemplifies everything that’s wrong with console to big-screen crossovers. Jockstrap-fresh from…

My Best Friend’s Girl

13 Nov 2008

(15) 99min From Howard Deutch, the auteur behind the seminal teen movie Pretty in Pink starring Molly Ringwald, My Best Friend’s Girl is a 1980s throwback rom-com, updated with scatological language. Dane Cook, so disagreeable in last year’s Good…

Postal

13 Nov 2008

(18) 99min Uwe Boll doesn’t have the best pedigree in movies; he’s an oft-reviled director with a penchant for videogame adaptations. But one thing you can’t dismiss is that the man has balls, and Postal is flat-out in-your-face nutzoid entertainment…

Quarantine

13 Nov 2008

(18) 89min Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s grimly effective Spanish-zombie movie [REC] gets the Hollywood treatment in John Erick and brother Drew Dowdle’s scene-by-scene remake. Quarantine purports to be the surviving document of what happens…

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

13 Nov 2008

(18) 149min Based on the non-fiction book by Der Spiegel editor and journalist Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a compelling and engrossing attempt to explain the trajectory and political position of arguably the most incoherent post-war…

Tigrero - A Film That Was Never Made

13 Nov 2008

(E) 75mins Diminutive, pugnacious and legendary director Sam Fuller (The Big Red One, Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor) returns to the Amazonian jungle where 40 years previously he had attempted to make a harsh on-location adventure film with…

Waltz With Bashir

13 Nov 2008

(18) 90min An animated feature about war, memory displacement and the hideous genocide committed by Christian militiamen on Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 Lebanese War may not sound particularly inviting but, like last…

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

13 Nov 2008

Forget the salacious sounding title, Zack and Miri is a Kevin Smith movie so it was never going to be a Ron Jeremy skin flick. Indeed, it’s an archetypical Smith movie – an over-sentimental tale in which boy knows girl, boy and girl have relationship…

Red or dead

13 Nov 2008

Bernd Eichinger is best known internationally as the writer and producer of Downfall and after having forced the German public to look back at their relationship with Hitler he has now turned his attention to the Red Army Faction (RAF). Whether these…

Hitlist - Film

13 Nov 2008

● Waltz with Bashir Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman’s animated war documentary that’s equal parts personal therapy and artistic innovation. Powerful, moving and beautiful. See profile and review. GFT, Glasgow; Cameo, Edinburgh and selected release from Fri…

Saxon

13 Nov 2008

(15) 92min Semi-blinded Eddie (Sean Harris) has to pay off his debts otherwise he’ll lose an eye to the gangsters who plucked out the other one. He’s handed a lifeline by childhood sweetheart, the wealthy Linda (Sarah Matravers), who is looking for…

The Voyage

13 Nov 2008

(PG) 97mins Vittoria de Sica (Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan) was one of the great voices of the Italian neo-realist film movement. He was also, alas, not always the most innovative of filmmakers, and this, his last completed film made in 1974, is…

While She Was Out

13 Nov 2008

(18) 82min This urban chiller executive produced by Mexican fantasist Guillermo del Toro and starring the enduringly gorgeous Kim Basinger and evergreen teen-alike Lukas Haas starts off promisingly but all too swiftly proves as lame as its pedestrian…

Summer scoops top prize at Bafta Scotland awards

10 Nov 2008

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.

Hunger

Protest picture

30 Oct 2008

'Were you out last night my friend?' 'Is it that obvious?' I say pulling down a wrinkled lower eyelid to expose an eye as bloodshot as those of the two men opposite me. They are hot young actor Michael Fassbender - all fair brown hair, blue eyes, slight…

Quantum of Solace

30 Oct 2008

Director Marc Forster has said in interviews that he agreed to do Bond because the producers asked him to make an art house version. Well, if this is art house then the Pope is atheist, Quantum of Solace starts with a trademark action sequence involving…

James Bond - Killer Tracks

30 Oct 2008

When Bond's latest music maker, Jack White, told Rolling Stone magazine recently that he wanted to 'join the family of Barry, Bassey, Connery and Craig', he cleverly omitted any reference to the occasional black sheep of the 007 family. After all…

Hunger

(15) 95min

30 Oct 2008

In 1981, IRA member Bobby Sands allowed his body to become the ultimate instrument of protest when he led the Maze prison hunger strike in order to win political status for imprisoned members of the IRA. Directed by Turner Prize winning artist Steve…

Terence Davies

Liverpool echo

30 Oct 2008

Of Time and the City is an idiosyncratic and deeply personal documentary essay, which draws on vivid archival footage and some inspired musical selections (everything from Mahler to Peggy Lee), it's narrated by Terence Davies, who peppers his commentary…

W.

30 Oct 2008

The American aphorism that suggests 'any boy can grow up to be president' is blandly dramatised in Oliver Stone's outrageously timed film, the first biopic to consider the life story of a sitting US president. Fresh from his deadly pursuit by Anton…

Also released

30 Oct 2008

The Midnight Meat Train, Pride and Glory, The Midnight Meat Train

Babylon

30 Oct 2008

The long overdue DVD release of Franco Rosso’s seminal 1980 tale of working class black youths and their music in South London really is something to celebrate. A kind of reggae counterpart to Quadrophenia, Rosso’s naturalistic film details the…

Bigga than Ben

30 Oct 2008

Very brief chance to catch Suzie Halewood's silly, mischievous and occasionally touching comedy about a couple of young Russians’ attempts to take London for all it is worth. The film stars Ben Barnes as one of the chain smoking, nihilist economic…

Brave Story

30 Oct 2008

Based on a novel by prolific Japanese authoress Miyuki Miyabe, Brave Story is a tale of love, friendship, and the sacrifices people must make in order to do what is right. Eleven-year-old protagonist Wataru meets Mitsuru, a lone figure who tells our…

Build your own Bond movie

30 Oct 2008

Exotic locations, the hot girl, the evil villain, clever gadgets, bad puns and interrupted love scenes.