Miles Fielder

Hierro

(12A) 88min Like the Spanish supernatural chiller The Orphanage, this psychological thriller directed by adman Gabe Ibáñez also revolves around a mother’s search for a missing child. And like its predecessor, Hierro also benefits from being…

Lars Husum - My Friend Jesus Christ

(Portobello Books) Before authoring this, his first novel, Danish writer Lars Husum worked at filmmaker Lars von Trier’s Copenhagen production company Zentropa as a script doctor. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that My Friend Jesus Christ has…

Sammy Going South

(PG) 118min (Optimum) A welcome DVD premiere for this lesser known, handsomely mounted and now digitally restored Alexander Mackendrick film from 1963, his first directorial credit after Sweet Smell of Success. Based on a novel by WH Canaway (who…

The Illusionist opens EIFF 2010 - Sylvain Chomet interview

The year after French animator Sylvain Chomet knocked out cinema-goers at the 2003 Edinburgh International Film Festival with his wildly eccentric and utterly charming double-Oscar nominated debut feature, Belleville Rendez-vous (aka The Triplets of…

Susie Hug - Tucson Moonshine

(Vacilando ‘68) Having collaborated on previous ‘solo’ projects with, variously, Fatima Mansions, The Blue Aeroplanes and Travis, the former Katydids frontwoman has now flown across the Atlantic to team up with south-western alt.country outfit…

Dan Sartain - Dan Sartain Lives!

(One Little Indian) Following in the footsteps of fellow American retro-rockers Jack White and Jon Spencer, Birmingham, Alabama’s Dan Sartain decamps to London to record his latest long-player at Toerag Studios under the guidance of producer Liam…

Daniel Clowes - Wilson

(Jonathan Cape) It’s heartening to know that Daniel Clowes isn’t turning his back on comics, despite writing movies in earnest since his Oscar nomination for adapting his own graphic novel, Ghost World. Clowes’ current movie projects include The…

The Night My Number Came Up

(PG) 91min (Optimum) Forget Final Destination, this is the original fateful flight film. Produced by Ealing Studios in 1955, it’s based on a supposedly true story via an article by Victor Goddard as adapted by RC Sherriff (who also wrote that same…

Salvage

(18) 81min (Revolver) This, the second of three films made under the micro-budget Digital Departures scheme initiated in 2008 during Liverpool’s year as City of Culture, couldn’t be more different from its predecessor, Terence Davies’ documentary…

The Kid

(U) 60min (Park Circus) By the time he made The Kid, Charlie Chaplin was an international movie star whose films had begun to earn a million bucks apiece. And although he’d been behind the camera since 1914, writing, directing, producing, editing…

The High Command

(PG) 84min (Optimum) This the first of the nine features made by the brilliant but undervalued British filmmaker Thorold Dickinson may not be a patch on his masterpieces, Gaslight and The Queen of Spades, but this 1936 drama set in colonial West…

The Clouded Yellow

(PG) 90min (Optimum) This gripping, fast-paced British thriller from 1950 follows the man-and-woman-on-the-run formula popularised elsewhere by Alfred Hitchcock. Based on a witty screenplay by Janet Green (who later went on the write Victim), it…

Brendan Gleeson has roles in both Perrier’s Bounty and Green Zone

Name Brendan Gleeson Born 29 March, 1955, Dublin, Ireland Background The lazy line to take on this scene-stealing character actor is he was a maths teacher for ten years before he decided to become and actor, and got his big break playing…

Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde

(15) 94min (Optimum) By the turn of the sexploitastic 1970s Hammer Films were upping the erotic content of their already titillating takes on horror classics with this transgender spin on Stevenson’s evil alter-ego tale of terror. Released in 1971…

Bernard Rose: Russian Studies

London-born, Los Angeles-resident filmmaker Bernard Rose talks to Miles Fielder about Russian authors, classical music and drug dealing...

The Kreutzer Sonata

(18) 99min Having discarded cumbersome period trappings for his superb, stripped down, contemporary Los Angeles-set Tolstoy adaptation Ivansxtc, writer/director Bernard Rose does the same with another story by the Russian master, the second in a…

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

(U) 92min (Oracle) Premiering on DVD to coincide with the release of Hollywood goth Tim Burton’s take on the Lewis Carroll classic, this 1972 British musical version can certainly be described as both lavish and faithful to its much-loved source.

The Bargee

(PG) 102min (Optimum) Forty years before Ewan McGregor shagged his way up and down the Edinburgh to Glasgow canal, Harry H Corbett was doing the same thing between Hertfordshire and Middlesex (oo-er). Corbett’s handsome Hemel Pike is a scruffy…

Motherhood

(15) 90min (Metrodome) Released in time for Mother’s Day, this comic drama about a day in the life of a harassed middle-class New York married mom of two sets hard about eliciting the sympathy of maternals everywhere. In an unlikely role…

Legacy brings The Wire's Stringer to the big screen - Idris Elba interview

Miles Fielder checks in with The Wire’s Idris Elba, who closes this year’s festival in Glasgow-produced film Legacy

Tower of London

(15) 92min (Optimum) This long unavailable (on DVD), deliciously nasty historical horror made in 1939 is all dungeons, manacles, torture and beheadings. But it’s also fairly classy stuff, boasting a fine cast headed by Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff…

An Inspector Calls

(PG) 77min (Optimum) Edinburgh’s famous son Alistair Sim leads the quality cast in this excellent 1954 adaptation of JB Priestly’s celebrated play. Set in small town England in 1912, it opens with the interruption of a dinner party at the home of a…

Chaw

(15) 117min (Optimum) This blackly comic South Korean horror film arrives on the back of the success of the Asian monster movie The Host. Like that film, Chaw (pronounced ‘chow’, meaning animal trap, but probably intended to invoke Jaws) is at once…

The Constant Husband

(U) 85min (Optimum) A man wakes up in a strange country with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. Enlisting the assistance of a local psychiatrist, the dazed chap begins to piece together his life and discovers to his mortification that…

In The Electric Mist

(15) 117min (High Fliers) The real mystery surrounding this adaptation of James Lee Burke’s bestselling crime novel In the Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead is why a perfectly respectable Hollywood movie boasting such an impressive cast and…