Miles Fielder

Rudo y Cursi - Brothers beyond

Mexican cinema took the world by storm at the turn of the millennium with the glorious hat trick of Amores Perros, The Devil’s Backbone and Y Tu Mamá También. Eight years after that last title – the hilariously raunchy sex comedy And Your Mother Too in…

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…

Acoustic Ladyland - Living With A Tiger

(Strong & Wrong) Acoustic Ladyland announced itself as something other than a jazz outfit with the release of its 2001 debut album inspired by the songs of Jimi Hendrix. The punk jazz label subsequently attached to the band confirmed founding members…

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.

George Pelecanos - The Way Home

SOCIAL DRAMA Having long since established his credentials as a chronicler of life on the mean streets of Washington DC, George Pelecanos more recently broadened his fanbase as screenwriter and story editor on The Wire, the Baltimore-based TV show…

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…

Howard Chaykin - American Flagg!

With a penchant for eroticism and violence, US comics visionary Howard Chaykin is releasing another groundbreaking work. Miles Fielder chats to him.

Dock Life - The Leith Festival

So what’s The Leith Festival, then? It’s an annual community celebration that takes in comedy, dance, film, literature, music, storytelling theatre, visual art and children’s events – in other words everything. A small affair, is it? Hardly. Its…

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…

Chuck Palahniuk: Pygmy

Having tackled the taboo subject of porn in his last book Snuff, Chuck Palahniuk’s tenth novel sees the controversy-courting author moving onto another no-no topic with this wickedly witty tale of terrorism in the American heartland. A terrorist attack…

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…

Guy Delisle - Burma Chronicles

TRAVELOGUE COMIC French-Canadian animator and cartoonist Guy Delisle previously documented his experiences in far-flung inaccessible countries with Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China and Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. His third graphic travel…

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…