Film, Miles Fielder

Parade

Released in 1974, the final film by the great French silent comedian Jacques Tati is a typically playful, though also extremely eloquent ending to his quarter-century film career. On the face of it nothing more than a series of circus acts compered by…

Moon: interview with director Duncan Jones

Cerebral science fiction thriller Moon heralds the arrival of an impressive new filmmaking talent in Duncan Jones, the son of David Bowie. Miles Fielder meets him.

Moon

Cleverly conceived, evenly paced and consistently intriguing, this old-school science fiction thriller is a very welcome repost to the numbing spectacle of what passes for sci-fi these days. Taking his cue from genre classics from the late 1960s through…

Christine Jeffs interview

Kiwi filmmaker Christine Jeffs (pictured centre right) wasn’t the obvious choice to direct the American indie comedy Sunshine Cleaning. Her previous two features, the New Zealand marital breakdown drama Rain and the British dead poet biopic Sylvia…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

Fermat's Room (La Habitacion de Fermat)

Spanish filmmakers are cornering the market in intriguing, ingenious thrillers. Following on from the chronology-warping comic thriller Timecrimes (released on DVD only in Scotland) this murderous mathematical mystery arrives to confound and…

Martyrs

(18) 95min This French splatter fest announces its deeply unpleasant intentions with a pre-title sequence in which a ten-year-old girl named Lucie is found hideously abused outside of a disused factory several months after being abducted by unknown…

Mark of an Angel

THRILLER (12A) 91min It’s partly spoiling the experience of watching this impressively executed French film to reveal that what begins as an engrossing character study transforms into a riveting domestic thriller. But to not make reference to the…

Helen

(PG) 79min Given that contemporary filmmaking in Britain continues to be comprised largely of stale costume dramas and gangster thrillers, cheap carbon copies of American horror movies and grim social realist stories either made by or made in the…

Everlasting Moments

DRAMA (15) 131min Given veteran Scandinavian filmmaker Jan Troell’s latest is about a woman discovering her natural ability for photography in early 20th century Sweden, it’s wholly appropriate that the film is a masterclass in visual design.

Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter

ANIMATION/ADVENTURE Tales of the Black Freighter, or ‘the pirate story’ as it’s also known, is the comic-within-the-comic that threads through the narrative of the Watchmen graphic novel. Excised from the film adaptation, it appears here as a…

A Time to Love and a Time to Die

WAR/DRAMA For his penultimate American film in 1958, Douglas Sirk, master of Hollywood melodrama, returned to his native Germany to shoot his most personal film. Adapted from the novel by Erich Maria Remarque (author of All Quiet on the Western…

Encounters at the End of the World

(U) 99min At the outset of his extraordinary, Oscar-nominated documentary about the life and landscape around the Antarctic community of McMurdo Station, director Werner Herzog announces that this is not a film about fluffy penguins. Sure enough…

The Small Back Room

THRILLER/DRAMA (PG) 104min This 1949 Powell and Pressburger collaboration has, historically, been overshadowed by the better known and far grander productions by the great director-writer team. Certainly, in comparison with the awesome…

Profile - Natalie Press

Name Natalie Press Born 15 August, 1980, London Background Just three years after the elfin actress made her professional debut in television soap Holby City she hit the big time with Pawel Pawlikowski’s rapturously received 2004 film My Summer…

Traitor

THRILLER Is Don Cheadle a defector to the Islamic fundamentalist cause in this the latest addition to Hollywood’s war on terror movie cycle? Or is his Sudan-born Muslim, US-bred ex-special ops demolitions expert Samir Horn still secretly a good guy?

The Antichrist

HORROR The Italians wasted no time ripping off the enormous success of The Exorcist, knocking out this dreadful demonic possession horror less than a year after Linda Blair blew green chunks all over Max von Sydow back in 1974. The Antichrist (aka…