Paul Dale

The Artist Rooms: Jeff Koons exhibition displays the artist's conceptualism, but is at odds with the age of austerity

Stockbroker-turned-mass-media-manipulator Koons has always been a contentious figure in the apolitically voyeuristic world of pop art. A Brooks Brothers outfitted amalgam of Warhol and Duchamps, Koons is only ever as interesting as the times he lives…

Jim Jones Revue - The Bongo Club, Edinburgh, Mon 28 Mar 2011

Storming show from the old school rock'n'rollers

Clement Monday nights in the shadow of the parliament and a stumble away from the pounded sheep trails where the radicals of the Enlightenment once surreptitiously gathered, are not supposed to be this loud, or fun.

Farewell (L'Affaire Farewell) - a romantic thriller set in the midst of the Cold War

Starring Emir Kusterica and Guilliame Canet

(12A) 113min Based loosely on the actions of high ranking KGB official and spy Vladimir Vetrov, Farewell is a complex but tender portrait of the Cold War in free fall, a place where a passionate eccentric like Vetrov (here renamed Grigoriev) can…

Toni Servillo and John Turturro events among Italian Film Festival 2011 highlights

Film by Roberto Rossellini and Paulo Virzi also screened

The Romans reconquer the central belt this year with a selection of the ancient and the modern. For the 2011 outing there’s a spotlight on celebrated actor Toni Servillo with screenings of his films The Girl By the Lake and One Man Up. Italian-American…

Arthur Flowers & Manu Chitrakar: I See the Promised Land

Mystical graphic novelisation inspired by the life Martin Luther King

(Tara Books) The life and times of saints and heroes have long been the base for storytelling traditions. With I See the Promised Land, African-American writer and blues singer Arthur Flowers repositions civil rights leader Martin Luther King’s story…

Tindersticks: Claire Denis Scores 1996–2009

Excellent anthology of film scores from the French filmmaker and regular collaborator Stuart Staples

(Constellation) This five-disc boxset containing six film scores are testament to the remarkable collaboration between French filmmaker Claire Denis, arguably the most intellectually fertile auteur working today, and Tindersticks bandleader Stuart A…

Stone and Who Loves the Sun among DVD release highlights

Featuring boxsets of Akira Kurosawa, Richard Woolley and Luis Buñuel

Here’s what may be of interest on DVD and Blu-ray that’s coming out in March. An Unflinching Eye: The Films of Richard Woolley (BFI ●●●●) brings together the almost complete short and feature work of this overlooked British filmmaker whose films were as…

Ron Peck on Thatcher-era thriller Empire State

Director of Nighthawks discusses overdue DVD and Blu Ray release

It’s mad to think that Ron Peck’s Thatcherite era thriller Empire State has lain dormant for so long. Set in and around the gay clubbing scene, which at the time was exploding in vast warehouse clubs in the UK, the film easily still stands next to The…

Fair Game

Thriller based on a true story, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts

(12A) 107min The CIA leak that effectively ended CIA operative Valerie Plame’s career, and the subsequent fallout that revealed a line of corruption leading all the way from Republican low-lives Karl Rove and 'Scooter' Libby to the Whitehouse…

Benda Bilili!

A documentary on the Congolese rhythm'n'blues band Staff Benda Bilili

Kinshasa is the largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s rated as one of the most dangerous cities in the world in terms of crime with a spiraling homeless problem that includes over 20,000 children under the age of 18 living rough…

Lord Rochester - Hey!

Sounds and smells like a 1960s garage band, but isn’t

(Twenty Stone Blatt) What sounds and smells like a 1960s garage band but isn’t? Lord Rochester, that’s who. Resurrected from some fantasy about aristocratic ruin and the ghosts of the D-Men, Lord Rochester fizz and fuzz their way through thirteen…

Jean-Marc Bustamante: Dead Calm

Toulouse born artist’s debut Scottish show

Toulouse born artist Jean-Marc Bustamante’s debut Scottish show carries with it the weight of Dickens’ sentiment that, ‘There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.’ Bustamante’s ‘thing’ is incongruity in technique…

Opening film Potiche and Little White Lies among GFF highlights

An overview of the careers of both actresses

The Catherine Deneuve-starring Potiche, opens the 2011 Glasgow Film Festival, while another programme highlight is Little White Lies starring Marion Cotillard. Paul Dale examines the career of both actresses.

Sophie Crumb - Evolution of a Crazy Artist

(WW Norton) From an early age, Robert Crumb’s maladjusted scion was the beneficiary of her parent’s archivist tendencies. His daughter’s ‘most interesting and expressive work’ was saved and now, 26 years later, the artist child revisits it and lays…

Brighton Rock reconnects with the novel’s central theme of Catholic guilt

2011 remake addresses fight against Catholic/Christian upbringing

The new film version of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock reconnects with the novel’s central theme of Catholic guilt. Cinema needs more of it, writes Paul Dal

Boxing biopic The Fighter - Melissa Leo profile

Actor plays Mickey Ward's mother in David O Russell film

Born 14 September, 1960, New York Background Leo is an actor whose early career was predominantly filled with small screen successes. She played Det Sgt Kay Howard on the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street for five seasons and was also a…

Scottish sex scandals throughout history

Scotland has had its fair share of cases involving illegal carnal pleasures

History may be written by the victors but we all know the interesting stuff, the sex scandals, are chronicled by salacious gossips and gifted storytellers. From the blood red sauce of the Jacobean tragedies to the tabloid game, set and match of the…

Sex in art: Four examples of Scottish eroticism

The Wicker Man, Young Adam, Love Made Easy and The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania

You can find good examples of Scottish eroticism without having to wallow through smut. The List picks four artworks that are worth seeking out for some homegrown, highbrow kicks

Get Low - Slow burn storytelling of character organising own ‘living funeral’

Film is too thin despite great performances from Robert Duvall, Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek

(PG) 103min George W Bush aside, was there ever a greater master of malapropism than gifted American baseball player Yogi Berra? He once noted that: ‘You should always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise, they won’t come to yours.’ Round about…

Genius Within: The Inner Life Of Glenn Gould

Film of archive material untangles the the life of Canadian pianist

(U) 108min What a deliriously nutty double bill this film would make alongside Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, François Girard’s schematic but pleasingly conceptual project completed in 1993. Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont’s feature…

Marc Camille Chaimowicz

Journey of Parisian artist from the punk performance early work to lyrical, introspective and politi

Echoing the words of his hero Gustave Flaubert, Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s first solo exhibition in Scotland is testimony to the notion that ‘Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; only faith and freedom.’ Parisian Chaimowicz’s art shares…

Private Road

(15) 89min (BFI) Barney Platts-Mills’ 1971 film is undoubtedly one of the great lost British masterpieces of the 1970s. Platts-Mills was a filmmaker whose previous cult film Bronco Bullfrog had taken a knife to the frothy London set cinema of the…

Enemies of the People

Horrifying but redemptive documentary of the Khymer Rouge’s 1970s genocide in Cambodia

(15) 93min Thet Sambath and Rob Lemkin’s horrifying but remarkably redemptive documentary revisits the architects of the Khymer Rouge’s 1970s genocide of the Cambodian people and somehow gets them to open up about the bloodbath and madness of those…

The best films of 2010

The Secret in Their Eyes, Un Prophet, Exit Through the Gift Shop, South of the Border, Black Death

The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto Des Sus Ojos) Argentinean romantic modern noir/thriller starring the mighty Ricardo Darín that really works. Worthy winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. A Prophet Jacques Audiard’s stunning…

Season of the Witch

Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman in broad but mildly entertaining supernatural medieval action adventure

(15) 94min Broad but mildly entertaining supernatural medieval action adventure in which Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman star as knights who must transport a woman/witch to a remote monastery. Dominic Sena (Gone in 60 Seconds, Swordfish) directs with…