Paul Dale

St Andrew's Day - The best film from Scotland

Our editors pick highlights from Scottish film through history

25 Nov 2011

Scotland shares Saint Andrew with areas of Russia, Romania, Greece and Malta, though this list is closed to the corruption of arthouse favourites like Theo Angelopoulos and Sergei Bondarchuk with their long names and even longer films. We’re assuming St…

Film books round-up

The Man in the Seventh Row, Cinema: The Whole Story, Hitchcock’s Magic and more reviewed

16 Nov 2011

Brian Pendreigh must surely be the hardest working movie-mad journalist and writer in Scotland. The Man in the Seventh Row (Blasted Heath ●●●) is his seventh book following biographies of Ewan McGregor and Mel Gibson, as well as Scottish cinema and…

Blood In The Mobile

Documentary explores mineral extraction in Eastern DR Congo for use in phone handsets

9 Nov 2011

(12A) 85min The mobile phone, that universal symbol of convenience and progress, comes at quite a price. We are not talking fiscal here, we are talking of a price above rubies, a cost measured in blood, sweat and tears. All mobile phones contain…

The Help

Oscar-bait portayal of the civil rights struggle in the Deep South

17 Oct 2011

(12A) 146min As Lee Hazlewood wrote in his musical paean to the nihilistic life: ‘Honey, I’m gonna snowball Jackson. See if I care.’ He needn’t have bothered, someone already had. A white American baby boom in the Deep South in the 1950s had taken…

Document 9 film festival highlights

The documentary film fest celebrates a 'year of protest' theme

12 Oct 2011

Boasting one of their best film line ups in years, the Document 9 human rights festival takes the theme of protest as its mascot this year. The festival opens with Andrea Roggon's Soy Libre (I am Free) about life and hope in modern day Havana. The next…

Interview: Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey at 2011 Document 9 film festival

Director Leila Doolan's doc on radical Irish politican Bernadette Devlin

11 Oct 2011

Leila Doolan's remarkable documentary Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey is one of the absolute highlights in Glasgow-based human rights film festival Document 9's very strong line up this year. The film follows the ideological and political…

Melancholia

Lars von Trier's sci-fi drama features star turns from Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg

21 Sep 2011

(15) 135min Melancholia is like the inversion of TS Elliot’s much quoted dictum. Is this how the world will end? With a bang not a whimper. Lars Von Trier’s curious, enigmatic and deterministic film seeks to equate the black dog of depression with an…

Tyrannosaur - Paddy Considine interview

The star of Dead Man's Shoes discusses his directorial debut

21 Sep 2011

There was a time when if a British actor got a bit of movie money, he (they were invariably male) would direct Henry V, A Bridge Too Far or The Night of the Hunter. But since Gary Oldman made Nil By Mouth in 1997, a very different generation of largely…

Tyrannosaur

Paddy Considine's directorial debut features strong performances from Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman

21 Sep 2011

(18) 92min Unemployed widower, drunk and all-round angry old man Joseph (Peter Mullan) stumbles into the council estate charity shop minded by good Samaritan volunteer Hannah (Olivia Colman), and friendship follows initial hostility. Despite her…

Red, White and Blue

Grimly progressive horror/thriller strips away cliché that surrounds the genres

19 Sep 2011

(18) 103min Erica (Amanda Fuller) is not a good girl. She’s promiscuous but dispassionate, nihilistic but emotionless. The girl’s clearly got some issues. The only person who manages to make any kind of non-sexual connection is weirdy beardy Nate…

Drive

16 Sep 2011

(18) 100min You should never drive faster than your guardian angel can fly. If only Ryan Gosling’s Hollywood stuntman/ getaway driver had heeded this advice he might not have got mixed up with beautiful mum Irene (Carey Mullighan), her jailbird beau…

Nick Sargent: A Scottish Land

Bold and charming celebration of the Scottish landscape

16 Sep 2011

With A Scottish Land, one-time set and costume designer and Edinburgh resident Nick Sargent returns to Oliver Chapman Architects in-house gallery space for the first time since their inaugural exhibition. Inspired by a photograph of a generic…

Crazy, Stupid, Love

Interesting observational comedy smothered by rom-com farce and sentimentality

16 Sep 2011

(12A) 118min Suburbia, modern day. Emily (Julianne Moore) tells husband Cal (Steve Carell) that she wants a divorce. Cal agrees to move and hits the local bar. After a period of drunken self-pity, local lothario Jacob (Ryan Gosling) takes him under…

Smile

Feeble collection riffing off ill-conceived ideas

24 Aug 2011

Between the Spangles wrapper psychedelia of its poster to the feeble collection of art in the gallery, Smile does nothing to live up to its name. Riffing off ill-conceived ideas honed from (a misunderstanding of) the Fluxus movement and the writings of…

Craig Collins & Iain Laurie - Roachwell

A dark, funny and disturbing achievement in self-published comics

24 Aug 2011

(roachwell.blogspot.com) Published online between 2009 and 2010, Roachwell is a fevered and messy collection of obtuse, amusing strips by Scottish writer/artists Craig Collins and Iain Laurie. Cremation and regeneration, house-hunting in the freak…

Post Mortem

Powerful sophomore feature based on 1970s Chilean politics

23 Aug 2011

(15) 97min It’s 1973 and work on President Salvador Allende’s ‘Chilean Path to Socialism’ is about to be brought to an abrupt halt by a Chilean military coup. Mario (Alfredo Castro) works for the Santiago morgue as a typist. Quiet, efficient, Mario…

Bette and Joan - The Final Curtain

Witty other-worldly ode to Hollywood starlets

23 Aug 2011

It’s 1989 and Bette Davis, betrayed by kith and kin, lies alone and dying. Her nemesis Joan Crawford arrives to guide her to the other side, and then the fireworks begin. Foursight Theatre’s witty and inventive deconstruction of the relationship between…

The Hedgehog (Le Herisson)

Smart and faithful adaptation of Muriel Barbery's best-selling book

23 Aug 2011

(12A) 99min There’s no demographic quite like the French bourgeoisie. Their revolution may as well not have happened, Gustav Flaubert pretty much summed things up when he wrote: ‘The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level…

Ruby Wax: Losing It

A fevered and empowering comic monologue

19 Aug 2011

According to a 2009 report, one in ten people in Scotland take daily medication for depression. This demographic are Ruby Wax’s kind of people. Broadened out from a community project that Wax and best friend/musician Judith Owen toured around NHS mental…

Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys

An art world friendship under a Scottish sky

17 Aug 2011

A single rose can make a garden; a single friend can make a world. Writer, artist and philosopher Richard Demarco’s friendship with the humanistic artist Joseph Beuys was something special. These two passionate, occasionally obtuse men were drawn to…

Paul Foot: Still Life

Childish ingenuity and some laughs but feels like going through the motions

16 Aug 2011

Like Frankie Howerd before him, procrastination and performance deconstruction filtered through a mesh of silliness are Foot’s stock in trade. Despite previous Fringe prowess, Still Life has him going through the motions. There’s childish ingenuity and…

The Qatsi trilogy at the 2011 Edinburgh International Festival

Godfrey Reggio's film trilogy with Philip Glass Ensemble live score is a masterpiece

15 Aug 2011

It’s been twenty-eight years since I saw Koyaanisqatsi, twenty-odd since I saw Powaqqatsi, and almost a decade since Naqoyqatsi. The first two I saw in empty art house cinemas on wet afternoons, I watched the third in a somnambulistic state from my sofa…

Danny Bevins

Muscular comedy from the former soldier, jailbird and redneck

15 Aug 2011

Former soldier, jailbird and dysfunctionally raised red neck, Bevins is a gifted and dyspeptic stand-up, stringing together material on the ancient theme that all humanity is excrement. Like a mildly less political Bill Hicks, Bevins likes to confound…

Carey Marx

The thinking man’s shock jock

12 Aug 2011

Middle-aged and feeling decrepit and pointless, Carey Marx believes in speaking his sordid little mind. Opinions on clitoral stimuli, fat people who stop suddenly in the street, feminists and circumcision-revenge-rabbi-rape spill easily from his…

Stephen Sutcliffe: Runaway, Success

Biography-obsessed artist hides behind his heroes

11 Aug 2011

It’s been a while since Yorkshire-born Glasgow resident Sutcliffe has trotted out his curious wares in Scotland, and it’s not difficult to see why. His work is moody and peppered with arch cultural references to complex arty prima donnas Joe Orton…