Film, Miles Fielder

373 articles

Sorted by popularity / date

Fuck for Forest

18 Apr 20134 stars

Documentary about Berlin eco-warriors who make amateur porn films

Let’s be clear: Fuck for Forest is a documentary about the titular Berlin-based environmental activists-cum-amateur porn makers and not a pornographic film in its own right. And despite there being quite a lot of flesh on display, Polish filmmaker…

Five reasons to go to the Italian Film Festival in Scotland 2013

17 Apr 2013

Every Blessed Day, The Commander and the Stork and Piazza Fontana among the festival highlights

The Commander and the Stork 'This is by director Silvio Soldini, who has been to the festival a couple of times in the past. He also made Bread and Tulips, which was very popular when we showed it. We’ve been very supportive of him. It’s a magic…

Michael H - Profession: Director

8 Mar 20133 stars

A limited portrait of the austere Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke

This French documentary about the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke convincingly argues Haneke is one of the most important and idiosyncratic filmmakers working today. Writer-director Yves Montmayeur’s doc also makes the more interesting point that…

Oz the Great and Powerful

8 Mar 20134 stars

An action-packed spectacle of a prequel, starring James Franco, Michelle Williams and Mila Kunis

This prequel to The Wizard of Oz might have been little more than an expensive special effects extravaganza were it not in the hands of a director with as distinctive a visual style and flair for knockabout comedy as Sam Raimi. As with Tim Burton’s…

Hi-So

26 Feb 20132 stars

Inert Thai drama about a directionless twenty-something in Bangkok

Form follows content in this tediously inert Thai drama about a young man caught between eastern and western cultures and suffering from emotional paralysis. Emotional paralysis is quite possibly the state writer-director Aditya Assarat’s film will…

back to top

Crawl

20 Feb 20132 stars

Australian thriller that borrows a little too heavily from the Coen brothers

Bucking the recent trend in Australian thrillers and chillers for grittily and gratuitously realistic lurid documentary-style dramas based on real events (see Wolf Creek et al), Crawl is a pointedly cinematic and resolutely fictional old school…

Side by Side

18 Feb 20133 stars

A-list directors on film vs digital debate in doc produced and presented by Keanu Reeves

The title of this reasonably interesting and fairly comprehensive documentary about traditional photochemical film and pioneering digital technology is slightly misleading. Although filmmakers have been using both forms for roughly the last decade and a…

Populaire

15 Feb 20133 stars

Immaculately styled French period romcom starring Déborah Francois and Romain Duris

This immaculately styled French period romantic comedy signals its pedigree with a colourful cartoon credit sequence reminiscent of cute and kookie Hollywood comedies circa the 1950s and 60s. And in fact, co-writer and director Régis Roinsard’s feature…

Run for Your Wife

11 Feb 20131 star

Hopelessly dated and poorly executed comedy starring Danny Dyer

This comprehensively cack-handed adaptation of the long-running West End stage sex comedy will have all but the most thick of skin and dim of humour running from the cinema as though their very lives depended up on it. Co-director and screenwriter Ray…

Best films featuring subways, metros and underground railways

21 Jan 2013

Featuring Skyfall, The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham 123

A mystery screening at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival takes you beneath the city’s streets for a film event in the subway. Cinema has long had affection for the warren-like tunnels and passageways of the underground – here are five of our favourite…

back to top

The House I Live In

17 Dec 20124 stars

Angry and illuminating documentary about America's war on drugs

Director Eugene Jarecki, the brother of fellow filmmaker Andrew, attacks America’s failed war on drugs in this angry and illuminating documentary that will leave viewers clued-in but fuming. Jarecki’s contention is the multi-billion dollar campaign…

Life of Pi

3 Dec 20124 stars

A fabulously beautiful and faithful adaptation from director Ang Lee

Yann Martel’s wildly imaginative, though long thought unfilmable, Booker Prize-winning 2001 novel is here treated to a ravishing 3D cinematic adaptation by filmmaker Ang Lee. Lee, who has previously transformed a wide variety of literary subjects…

Five reasons to see the films of Alexander Mackendrick

20 Nov 2012

The director of Whisky Galore! and Sweet Smell of Success is the subject of a retrospective

It’s the centenary of the birth of the Scottish-American filmmaker who became one of Ealing studios’ greatest directors. Born in Boston, Massachusetts to Scottish immigrant parents, Mackendrick moved back to Glasgow with his grandfather when he was just…

Alps

13 Nov 20123 stars

Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth follow-up retains that film's weird sensibility but lacks its wider focus

Having launched a new wave of bizarro Greek cinema (see also Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg) with his Oscar-nominated queasy black comedy Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos returns with a follow up that’s just as absurdly idiosyncratic. The Alps of the…

Why Scottish television drama goes beyond Rebus and Taggart

1 Nov 2012

Recent TV drama includes Lip Service, Single Father, Waterloo Road and The Field of Blood

Not so very long ago, Scottish television drama was dominated by Rebus and Taggart. The audience-conquering popularity of STV’s Edinburgh and Glasgow cops was such that you could be forgiven for thinking Scotland hosted or produced little but crime…

back to top

Sister

9 Oct 20125 stars

Utterly absorbing drama about fractured family relationships

Swiss-French filmmaker Ursula Meier follows her feature debut, the tragic-comic domestic drama Home, with another leftfield story about a family in dysfunction. In this case, it’s a family of two comprising a 12-year-old boy named Simon (Kacey Mottet…

Room 237

5 Oct 20124 stars

Compelling documentary about the hidden meanings in Kubrick's The Shining

This frighteningly engrossing documentary presents a series of (supposedly) hidden meanings to be found imbedded in Stanley Kubrick’s modern horror classic The Shining. The various readings of the film, which range from quite plausible to utterly balmy…

Barbara

6 Sep 20124 stars

Slow burning drama set in East Germany with real dramatic weight

Germany’s Best Foreign Language Film contender for next year’s Academy Awards recalls the country’s 2007 winner The Lives of Others inasmuch as it dramatises life lived under the watchful eye of the authorities in East Germany before the wall came down.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

19 Aug 20124 stars

Provocative drama from the French Ken Loach, Robert Guédiguian

Not to be confused with the 1952 Hollywood film of the same name, this is the latest slice of social realism from France’s answer to Ken Loach, Robert Guédiguian. Guédiguian’s The Snows of Kilimanjiro takes it name from the 1966 sugary French pop hit…

A Simple Life

16 Aug 20124 stars

Heartfelt drama about film producer becoming carer to his elderly maid

Hong Kong’s nomination for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards is a paen to the aged and to caring for the old that avoids the obvious pitfalls of its tender subject matter by being compassionate but never sentimental…

back to top

The Forgiveness of Blood

8 Aug 20124 stars

Compelling Albanian drama from the director of Maria Full of Grace

Los Angelino filmmaker Joshua Marston repeats the success of his first film, the award-winning Maria Full of Grace, with a second compelling foreign language drama that unfolds beyond the borders of the First World. Marston’s follow-up to Maria, which…

Marilyn Monroe's finest on-screen moments

29 Jul 2012

The screen icon is the subject of a retrospective season at the Filmhouse

Some Like it Hot (1959) From a wide angle shot the camera closes in on Monroe’s singer Sugar Kane as she trills ‘Just you, and nobody else but you’ and we get a load of THAT DRESS. The ‘naked dress’ as the get-up became known as, ensured Billy…

El Bulli: Cooking in Progress

16 Jul 20123 stars

Meticulous documentary about the exclusive Catalonian restaurant

This German documentary about the most famous restaurant in the world is the closest you will ever get to sitting at a table in El Bulli, given it closed its doors on 30 July last year and bearing in mind only the rich or famous or extraordinarily…

Revenge of the Electric Car

16 Jul 20124 stars

Tim Robbins narrates this environmental doc with a positive story to tell

Here’s a rarity: an environmentally themed documentary that’s got a positive story to tell. It’s a sequel to director Chris Paine’s 2006 doc Who Killed the Electric Car?, which was another deeply frustrating story of failure to do right by the…

Dark Horse

12 Jul 20124 stars

Todd Solondz film is supremely dark and disturbing suburbia satire

Supremely dark and disturbing satirist of American suburbia Todd Solondz’s seventh feature is his most fully realised and mature film (in cinematic terms, if not subject matter) to date. It might not boast the jaw-dropping subversive outrageousness of…