Issue 642

Alan Cumming, Calvin Harris and Glasvegas among nominees at Scottish Style Awards 2009

Glasgow certainly knows how to do things with class, and this year’s Scottish Style Awards look set to raise the bar even higher. The starry event takes place on Hallowe’en and their stylish cauldron is likely to be spilling over with high profile…

Natalie Merchant, The Chieftains and Ry Cooder set for Celtic Connection 2010

Celtic Connections launched with a suitable level of expectation this fortnight – and it doesn’t look set to disappoint. Comprising 1500 artists, 300 concerts, ceilidhs, talks, workshops, free events and late-night sessions, the programme of events will…

Scottish BAFTA nominations announced

Peter Capaldi, Richard Jobson and Armando Iannucci are just some of the names nominated at this year’s BAFTA Scotland Awards. The awards, to be held at the Glasgow Science Centre on Sun 8 Nov, will see Capaldi fight it out with Stephen McCole and James…

The Dark Things

Ursula Rani Sarma’s first full-length commission for the Traverse offers a fascinating commentary on contemporary attitudes to death, specifically as manifested in the confessional, commercial nature of contemporary art. The central focus of the piece…

David Austen: My love, I have been digging up my own bones in the garden again

The topsy-turvy poetics of David Austen’s exhibition title are in keeping with the tragicomic works of which the exhibition is comprised. At once fragile and striking, this collection of watercolour figures, bold text paintings and a silent film study…

Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Fans of this touchstone of the Scottish literary canon can breathe fairly easy. Mark Thomson’s adaptation of James Hogg’s 1824 novel Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner pulls off the neat trick of being very faithful to the plot of the…

Document 7

The International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival just gets stronger and stronger. This year punters are spoiled for choice with a selection of local and international films dealing with everything from child neglect to women’s rights and endemic…

Dark Nature

Special Hallowe’en screening of this scary Scottish eco thriller about one family’s not so relaxing holiday to a remote Scottish village. Up and coming producer/director Marc de Launey pulls out all the stops for this very low budget production, much…

Starsuckers

Also out this fortnight is Chris Taking Liberties Atkins’ wonderfully mischievous documentary foray into the world of celebrity obsessed media. Atkins and his team hilariously illustrate just how easy it is to plant hoax celebrity stories with an…

Dead Man Running

(15) 91min A loan shark gives an ex con 24 hours to pay his debt. Disappointing thriller from the writer/director of appalling 2004 boxing drama The Calcium Kid. The casting however which includes renta-mockney Danny Dyer, rapper turned self help…

Mike Inglis: Shadows Fade

Inglis’ installation of prints and human scale paste-ups explores spiritualism and attitudes to grief, death and loss through the stories of the artist’s great aunt, a spiritualist in a Fife mining village and his grandmother, who lost her first…

Pigs and Battleships

This very rare screening of Japanese auteur Shohei Imamura’s wonderfully barbed and surreal 1961 military satire brings to an end an excellent season of the great man’s films. If you have missed the others check this one out because it is also the most…

Tricks

(12A) 95min Naturalistic but sweet natured Polish drama about one six-year-old boy’s attempt to change his family’s destiny by meditative will alone. Well observed, performed and directed by promising Kieslowski influenced filmmaker Andrzej…

Beyond Biba

These screenings of Louis Price’s new film about the glamorous and troubled times of swinging London’s most famous clothing boutique, and its creator Barbara Hulanicki, will be followed by a Q&A with the great lady herself. GFT, Glasgow, Tue 27 Oct…

Michael Jackson’s This Is It

Compilation of interviews, rehearsals and backstage footage of Jackson as he prepared for his final tour. Unnecessary and largely tedious documentary cobbled together by Kenny Ortega, the man who gave us the High School Musical films. One for the fans.

An American Werewolf in London

(15) 97min Second John Landis directed reissue to be re-released this fortnight. Still good after all these years. Selected release from Fri 30 Oct.

National Lampoon’s Animal House

(15) 108min John Landis’ seminal 1978 frat house comedy on new digital print. Selected release from Tue 3 Nov.

The Cove

(12A) 90min Shocking investigative documentary about Japanese animal and sea life rights abuses. GFT, Glasgow from Fri 23 Oct.

Taste test: Vodka made in Scotland

It's not all whisky here

Grafitti, Pincer, Glen's, Blackwood's, Straight Strawberry, Raspberry Vodka

Profile: Cristian Mungiu

A look at the award winning director before his latest work, Tales From the Golden Age

Name Cristian Mungiu Born 27 April 1968 Background The graduate of the Bucharest Film School became the first Romanian director to win the Palme d’Or with his abortion drama 4 months 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Before becoming a full-time director…

Jeanne La Pucelle: The Battles/The Prisons

Epic Joan of Arc biopic

Following on from Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson in exploring the story of Joan of Arc, Jacques Rivette offers an account of the martyr that is as political and gender oriented as it is spiritual in this 1995 two-film epic finally available on two…

Colin

No-budget Welsh zombie horror

(18) 97min Young Welsh horror movie fan Marc Price apparently made this zombie flick for just £45 – the cost of keeping his crewmates in tea and biscuits for the 18 months of weekend filming plus a few buckets of red food dye. If true, that makes…

Secret Defense

Menace in every moment

Veteran New Wave filmmaker Jacques Rivette (Paris Nous Appartient, La Belle Noiseuse, Celine and Julie Go Boating) explores the sins of the past. Rivette regular Sandrine Bonnaire plays Parisian research scientist Sylvie Rousseau. When her brother shows…

Night Train to Inverness

Gutsy period curo

Directed by oft overlooked British film and TV director Ernest Morris (The Tell-Tale Heart, The Court Martial of Major Keller), this tight, train-bound 1960 thriller has a lot to commend it. When ex-convict Roy Lewis (Norman Wooland) turns up in…

Playing Away

A 1980s sports comedy to transcend racial stereotypes

This is a very welcome reissue of Horace Pressure Ové’s 1987 comedy of race manners. When a West Indian cricket team from Brixton travels to a Suffolk village to play against the local team as the culmination of the village’s Third World Week, racial…