Paul Dale

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

2 Oct 2008

Screenwriter, producer and director Bob Weide has spent his two score and ten odd years genuflecting at the altar of American comedy. A foremost knowledge on the life and work of the Marx Brothers (along with our own Simon Louvish) and, arguably, the…

LGBT DVD Round-Up

18 Sep 2008

International interest in the sciences may have been piqued by the recent, less-exciting-than-it sounds Big Bang experiment but let’s face it – the most important question is: ‘If time and space are curved, where do all of the straight people come…

Salo

18 Sep 2008

DVD (18) 112min (BFI DVD retail) Pier Paolo Pasolini’s loose 1975 adaptation of the Marquis De Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom gets an excellent two disc DVD (and Blu-ray) makeover with a ton of fantastic extras. Pasolini transposed De Sade’s tale…

Taken

18 Sep 2008

THRILLER/ACTION (15) 93min *** When it comes to his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), retired US secret agent operative Bryan (Liam Neeson) is feeling pretty redundant. Her new stepfather (Xander Berkeley) is wealthy enough to give her everything she…

Angel

4 Sep 2008

After years of gleeful, near bi-polar genre shifting, France’s greatest living film parodist, Francois Ozon (5x2, 8 Women, Sitcom), makes the film that every gay teenager, who has grown up in the latter part of the 20th century, would kill to…

The Banishment

4 Sep 2008

Fledgling master Russian filmmaker Andrei The Return Zvyagintsev’s flawed second feature is a nonetheless interesting fusion of British gangster flick Sexy Beast, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and (thematically at least) Scenes from a Marriage as created by…

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

4 Sep 2008

Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the nine-year-old son of a Nazi Commandant (David Thewlis). When his father is seconded to manage a concentration camp in a remote area of the Fascist empire, the lonely Bruno makes a new friend, Schmuel (Jack Scanlon), beyond…

W.

Oedipus Tex

4 Sep 2008

Paul Dale welcomes Josh Brolin’s first lead role and Oliver Stone’s Presidential biopic W. with glee

Another Kind of Silence

Enviromentalist writer brought to compelling life

21 Aug 2008

If the environmental movement in the US has a progenitor and figurehead it is marine biologist and nature writer Rachel Carson. Her writing and research in the late 1950s/early 1960s brought attention to the then unfashionable issue of conservation…

Chad McCail

Puberty, print, perversion and compulsory education

21 Aug 2008

What a remarkable and strange artist Chad McCail is. By his own admission half of his output tends to be peopled by ‘robots, zombies or wealthy parasites’, while the other half looks like loose leaves from a particularly perverse Ladybird book. Both…

Foreskins Lament

21 Aug 2008

This dodgy production of New Zealand playwright Greg McGee's landmark 1980 play is played out in the locker room of a local rugby club changing room. A couple of really appalling performances and some less than inspired direction derail things. Still at…

New World Order

Neo-conspiracy crimes, Shakespearean-style

21 Aug 2008

Fringe acclaimed over the last two years for Love Labours Won, West Yorkshire writer, director and performer Ryan JW Smith returns with a much more bitter pill. Smith loves Shakespeare. His is the cut'n'paste approach to the bard; his conceit here is…

Gimme Shelter

14 Aug 2008

DOCUMENTARY (E) 91min (Warner Home Video DVD retail) The second Maysles brothers documentary to be given a new lease of life on DVD in so many months, Gimme Shelter is by far their most contentious film, and arguably the most tragic film ever made…

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

14 Aug 2008

FARCE/ROMANCE (PG) 91min Opinionated, unemployable London governess Miss Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) has just lost another job. Dumped by her agency and homeless Miss Pettigrew manages to worm her way in to the house of American wannabe starlet…

More Lives than One – Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas

14 Aug 2008

Taking inspiration from Micheál MacLiammóir’s legendary one-man show The Importance of Being Oscar, veteran thesp Leslie Clark takes a less sycophantic view of Wildean times. This is illuminating stuff. Clark commandeers the audience, but (among other…

Return of the Soul - The Nakbah Project

A secret persecution preserved in wax

14 Aug 2008

Scottish based painter, theatre designer and now multimedia artist Jane Frere revisits the Nakbah, the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people in 1948 when the newly UN-sanctioned nation of Israel expropriated ‘lebensraum’ (living room) through…

Salesman

14 Aug 2008

DOCUMENTARY (E) 91min (Eureka DVD retail) The first of two recent DVD debuts for seminal documentaries made by the Maysles brothers, Salesman is the non-narrated account of four Boston door-to-door bible sellers. Made in 1968 and shot in black and…

Sanford Wurmfield: E-Cyclorama

Rainbow in the round

14 Aug 2008

New York based artist Wurmfield’s new creation is a sight to behold. He channels the colour theories of the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell by way of Goethe, the Scottish Enlightenment (there is a reason this work is being premiered in the…

St Nicholas

All theatre critics are bloodsucking scum

14 Aug 2008

Conor McPherson was clearly settling old scores when he wrote St Nicholas in 1997. Like many of his earliest plays, it’s a monologue and tall tale. This one is told by a successful Dublin theatre critic, a self professed ‘hack and a drunkard’. Bitter…

Tropical Malady

14 Aug 2008

DRAMA/FANTASY (12A) 118min (Second Run DVD retail) Thai architect, artist, writer and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has made a handful of experimental documentaries and fictional films that are so wayward and quirky in structure that they…

Angel Face

7 Aug 2008

THRILLER (PG) 91min (Blackhorse DVD retail) Otto Preminger’s complex and clever 1952 film noir about how salt of the earth ambulance driver Frank (Robert Mitchum) becomes mixed up with femme fatale Diane Tremayne (Jean Simmons) is certainly something…

Best of the 15th Raindance Film Festival Shorts

7 Aug 2008

SHORTS (15) 100min (PIAS DVD retail) Cottoning on to the fact that in the future the best film festivals will probably take place online and from the comfort of our own homes, those good people at Raindance have put together a best of DVD. The…

Bethany Black

Personal story told with little verve

7 Aug 2008

You would think that a goth, lesbian, post-op transsexual might have a few interesting stories to tell? And Bethany Black does, but she doesn't know how to tell them. From an early age Black felt she was in the wrong body. By her twenties she was…

Eco-friendly Jihad

Saving the planet with fun

7 Aug 2008

Irish columnist and comedian Abie Philbin Bowman, creator of Jesus: The Guantanamo Years, returns for a second coming. This time, he wants to save the world and like his famous father (Irish broadcaster and historian John Bowman) he believes that real…

Elite Squad

7 Aug 2008

THRILLER (18) 114min Between the wars the French anti-democrat, arch monarchist and writer Georges Bernanos wrote that: ‘The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.’ Foreseeing France’s defeat…

Lucidity

7 Aug 2008

Imagine One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest adapted by the kids from Skins, but worse. Hysteria is the order of the day when suicidal posh nob nihilist Julian gets sectioned. Stock characters are wheeled out, while Oliver James' Affluenza is filtered…

Married Life

7 Aug 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE (PG) 90min Suburban America, 1949. President Harry S Truman has just unveiled his Fair Deal plan and the People’s Republic of China is in the process of being born. As befits his business class status, mild-mannered Harry Allen (Chris…

Pete Firman

7 Aug 2008

For a bit of straightforward, old-fashioned entertainment you can't go wrong with comedy magician Firman. With the giddy fakir style trickery skills of Tommy Cooper and the flirtatious warmth of Eric Morecambe, he's a northern crowd-pleasing wonder.

The Open Couple

7 Aug 2008

This re-improvised restaging of Dario Fo and Franca Rame's superb, oft overlooked 1983 two-hander is a delight. Though too young for their roles (Fo and Rame played them in their 50s), Stuart Brennan and Jennifer Dean are brilliantly convincing as the…

Time Bomb

7 Aug 2008

It's 2017 and Westminster wants to go nuclear on Iran, but MP Victoria Clarke and her middle English family hold a secret that could change the vote forever. There's some nice ideas about where the personal and apocalyptic meet in Tim Burton's one-act…

Weights

A see and eye shotgun tale

7 Aug 2008

Poet, playwright, actor and former judo champion Lynn Manning knows all about loss. Raised in penury in California, Manning lost his parents to the bottle and his siblings to the foster care system. Then in 1978, aged 23, Manning lost his sight in a…

Richard Jenkins - Exclusive interview

Audio

5 Aug 2008

At this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival I had the great pleasure of grabbing a chat with the American actor, and proud son of Illinois, Richard Jenkins. I have been a great admirer of Jenkins work as a character actor since his marginal…

Errol Morris - Exclusive interview

Audio

5 Aug 2008

Paul Dale goes head to head with arguably the best documentarian and interviewer of his generation - Errol Morris. Morris was in town to promote his soon to be released film Standard Operating Procedure.

A Comedy of Power

31 Jul 2008

THRILLER (PG) 110min (ICA DVD retail) Veteran French filmmaker Claude Chabrol takes on the story of magistrate Eva Joly’s ceaseless investigation into France’s leading oil company Elf Aquitaine. The inquiry led to a national scandal in 1994 which The…

Man On Wire

31 Jul 2008

DOCUMENTARY (12A) 94min Meet Philippe Petit – French artist, performer and high wire walker. On the afternoon of 6 August 1974, Petit and six accomplices set off for the World Trade Centre in an unmarked van. With forged ID passes and dressed as…

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

31 Jul 2008

WESTERN (15) 180min The third part of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western ‘Dollars trilogy’ receives a new print re-release ahead of its predecessors A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More (their digital re-release comes in September). As stupid…

The Long Day Closes

31 Jul 2008

DRAMA (PG) 81min (BFI DVD retail) Following on from the recent releases of The Terence Davies Trilogy and Distant Voices, Still Life comes the arrival on DVD of what Davies loosely described as the third and final part of an autobiographical series of…

Little Feat

Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival

22 Jul 2008

Formed in 1969 by Lowell George, one of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, Little Feat were always going to be different from the blues bands of the period. Small in stature, guitarist and lead singer George was a talented firebrand of R&B, country…

DVD Round-Up

3 Jul 2008

The time has come to celebrate British cinema. Not the British cinema of Hitchcock, Powell and Pressburger, David Lean or Robin The Wicker Man Hardy, but the cinema of subsidies and struggle, the results of which have barely seen the inside of a cinema…

Haptic

3 Jul 2008

DESIGN The Lighthouse, Glasgow, until Mon 29 Sep High design and its pioneering spirit are taken on a Seuss-like tangent in this enjoyable, inventive and very silly exhibition. According to curator Kenya Hara’s notes ‘haptic’ means ‘relating or…

Jules et Jim

3 Jul 2008

NEW PRINT/ROMANCE (PG) 105min French New Wave filmmaker Francois Truffaut’s third film, made in 1962, was undoubtedly his masterpiece. Set in the 1910s and 20s it is the story of a freewheeling love triangle between alpha female Catherine (Jeanne…

The Apartment

3 Jul 2008

NEW PRINT/SATIRE (PG) 125min Billy Wilder’s corrosive 1960 lampoon of corporate America is now so familiar to most people that it barely seems to deserve the time investment that this new print demands. Look again, though, and there is plenty of…

The Visitor

3 Jul 2008

DRAMA (15) 106min Ageing widower and economics professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is a grouch. He spends his days giving his students a hard time. When he is sent to Manhattan to present a dull paper, a series of misunderstandings lead him to…

Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008

3 Jul 2008

PHOTOGRAHY National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 21 Sep Any exhibition that begins with an Ashkenazi Jewish songwriter (Irving Berlin) and ends with a sloaney celebrity culture muse (Diana, Princess of Wales) is worth a peek. Following New…

Bigga Than Ben: A Russian's Guide to Ripping Off London

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(SA Halewood, UK) 85min Allegedly based on the diary of a young Moscovite who came to London in the late 1990s, Bigga than Ben is, for the majority of its running time, a distracting black comedy. Cobakka (Ben Barnes) and Spiker (Andrei Chadov) are a…

Elite Squad (Tropa D'Elite)

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(José Padilha, Brazil) 118min Based on Luiz Eduardo Soares’ bestseller, Elite Squad is a favela thriller from the director of 2002 documentary Bus 174. It’s 1997 in Rio de Janeiro, months before a visit from Pope John Paul II. The rundown housing…

Matter of fact - Documentaries at the EIFF

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

When the Edinburgh International Film Festival opened its doors for the first time in 1947, documentary films were the only things on the menu. Much has changed since then, but the EIFF has continued its commitment to the feature documentary form. Every…

The Edge of Love

19 Jun 2008

DRAMA (15) 110min Dylan Thomas, he of the milk wood, once remarked that: ‘When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.’ The Edge of Love is the story of how the great Welsh poet burnt a very big bridge, one that connected him to an…

Female Agents (Les Femmes Des Ombres)

19 Jun 2008

WAR/THRILLER (15) 116min Spring 1944, the lead up to the Normandy landings, and the technical planning and manufacture of a floating dock has been going on since January. When a British geologist ends up in a French hospital, the plan is thrown into…

Jo Spence: Self Portraits

19 Jun 2008

PHOTOGRAPHY Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, until Sun 16 Nov Working class artist, photographer, Marxist, feminist, teacher and publisher Jo Spence was an extraordinary talent. Issue-based but always accessible, her work can be seen as the progenitor…

Leah Hayes - Funeral of the Heart

19 Jun 2008

SHORT STORIES (Fantagraphics) Welcome to the weird world of Leah Hayes. Where an elderly couple digs mysterious tunnels at night. Where a young male kitchen hand becomes a duck-slaughtering expert when his girlfriend develops an unusual illness. Or…

Wenders season offers insight into world of major film figure

10 Jun 2008

The GFT's Wim Wenders season consists of five of the director's most well known films: Kings of the Road, The American Friend, Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire and tonight’s film Alice in the Cities made in 1974.

Edinburgh International Film Festival - Jeanne Moreau

5 Jun 2008

Born between the wars to an English chorus girl mother and a French restaurateur father, Jeanne Moreau was born to play what feminist film critic Molly Haskell called ‘the glorious fantasy, appealing to both sexes, to men as eternal mistress, to women…

Gone Baby Gone

5 Jun 2008

THRILLER/DRAMA (15) 113min Ben Affleck’s long delayed (because of the Madeline McCann case) child abduction crime drama finally stumbles in to British cinemas. Based, like Clint Eastwood’s 2003 film Mystic River, on a novel by Irish Bostonian Dennis…

Priceless

5 Jun 2008

COMEDY/ROMANCE (12A) 104min The best things in life are free, but all seasoned Riviera gold digger Irène (Audrey Tautou) wants is her own credit card from an ageing sugar daddy. Meanwhile, luckless, impoverished bar tender and dog walker Jean (Gad…

The Aerial (La Antena)

22 May 2008

SILENT/SATIRE (12A) 90min Argentinean writer and director Esteban Sapir utilises the syntax of classic silent cinema to winning effect in this amusing and inventive futuristic adventure. Set in some Orwellian style future city where words and language…

Jason Lutes - Jar of Fools

22 May 2008

TRAGEDY/NOIR (Faber) First serialised in Seattle’s alternative newspaper The Stranger back in 1993, and anthologised in the US in 2003, Lutes’ remarkable graphic novel is long overdue a decent European release. Jar of Fools tells the story of…

Carbon/Silicon, Hard Fi and BMRC rock the JD Set Legendary Mash

22 May 2008

Paul Dale reports from the JD Set Legendary Mash, a very special, intimate music event at the Jack Daniel's distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee.

Shotgun Stories

22 May 2008

REVENGE/TRAGEDY (12A) 90min Poverty and hope are the currencies traded in the southeastern part of Arkansas that is the stage for Jeff Nichol’s feature debut. This is a land of downriver people whose luckless lives are tied to the Mississippi-enriched…

Honeydripper

8 May 2008

DRAMA (PG) 124min God may have given rock’n’roll to us but Alabama gave us the electric blues. The story of its genesis is one that writer and director John Sayles (Lone Star, Matewan, Silver City) sets out in his latest film treatise in search of the…

XXY

8 May 2008

DRAMA (15) 90min What would you do if your only child was a hermaphrodite? Would you let this anomaly of nature lie or would you welcome the intervention of major surgery? This is the dilemma at the centre of Argentinean screenwriter Lucía Puenzo’s…

Gregory Isaacs

8 May 2008

REGGAE Citrus Club, Edinburgh, Tue 20 May Born in Kingston Jamaica in 1950, five years after Bob Marley, Gregory Isaacs’ musical trajectory offers a fascinating counterpoint to the beloved Rastafarian musician. While Isaacs’ early inspirations came…

Cashback

8 May 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE (15) 102min In the words of Faithless’ Maxi Jazz, art student and late night supermarket shift worker Ben (Sean Biggerstaff) ‘can’t get no sleep’. Ever since he split up with his girlfriend Suzy (Michelle Ryan) he’s been wandering around…

Honeydripper - John Sayles Interview

8 May 2008

‘Some of the plot of Honeydripper comes from this rock’n’roll legend called Guitar Slim who was a New Orleans guitar player in the early 1950s. He had a huge hit with a song called ‘The Things That I Used to Do’ which was arranged by Ray Charles when he…

Outpost

8 May 2008

HORROR (18) 89min Beefy mercenary DC (Ray Stevenson) has just made a bad decision. He’s taken a job from shadowy businessman Hunt (Julian Wadham). DC and his band of professional soldiers have to get Hunt into an abandoned bunker in an Eastern…

Richard Cowdry & Various - The Bedsit Journal No 2

8 May 2008

COMPILATION (Bedsit Journal) Marshalled together by the artist and writer Richard Cowdry whose previous comic seed bombs include Kartoon Cuts and Knucklehead, this funny, bitter and vulgar collection of new comic book talent proves what can be done…

Also Released - Film

24 Apr 2008

Pathology (18) 94min •• When new intern Ted (Milo Ventimiglia) stumbles across a very nasty little secret at a university hospital in Philadelphia, he knows he has to act. The trouble is that the future of his career revolves around him turning a blind…

Mike Leigh - Happy-Go-Lucky

10 Apr 2008

At 65 years of age, it’s good to see that Mike Leigh has learned nothing about handling the press. By turns blustery, crabby, contrary, humourless, paranoid and evasive, Leigh belongs to that generation of no nonsense, taciturn northern men epitomised…

The 39 Steps

10 Apr 2008

THRILLER/NEW PRINT (U) 85min Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1935 thriller finds its way back on to the big screen courtesy of a new digital cinema and 35mm print. Scottish author and unionist politician John Buchan’s novel has been filmed three times, but…

Happy-Go-Lucky

10 Apr 2008

DRAMA (15) 118min The social realism-orientated cinema of British filmmaker Mike Leigh takes on a slightly different tone with Happy-Go-Lucky, his most recent foray into a kind of filmic anthropology of (to use the great filmmaker’s own words) ‘how we…

Film Books Round-Up

10 Apr 2008

The debate about US cinema from the late 1960s continues with Yale graduate Mark Harris’ Scenes from a Revolution (Canongate ••••). It starts with the fairly flaky premise that the 1967 Academy Award ceremony was the night that the new Hollywood was…

Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis

10 Apr 2008

AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Vintage) In advance of the Persepolis feature-length animation to be released at cinemas at the end of this month (25 April if you want to note it in your diary) comes this welcome two-in-one paperback edition of Satrapi’s seminal…

Boys-only cocktail classes

27 Mar 2008

‘If you want an interesting party sometime,’ the American novelist Robert Fulghum quipped, ‘combine cocktails and a fresh box of crayons for everyone.’ Today I’m doing the next best thing: I’m joining a cocktail class aimed at getting men back into the…

Son of Rambow

27 Mar 2008

DRAMA (12A) 95min It’s the summer of 1983. Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative party are winning their second landslide election victory and NASA is putting the first American woman in space, two schoolboys from the south of England are about to…

Also Released - Film

27 Mar 2008

The Hottie and the Nottie (12A) 90min • Paris Hilton stars as a hot babe who performs a makeover on her plain friend June (Christine Lakin) so she can get some dates in the excruciatingly unfunny romantic comedy. General release from Fri 28 Mar .

My Brother is an Only Child

27 Mar 2008

DRAMA (15) 103min It is sometimes worth remembering that there was a time of passion and politics in Europe before mass consumerism and cultural deception helped nullify and stupefy the general populace. This nostalgic idea runs through Antonio…

10,000 BC

13 Mar 2008

ADVENTURE (12A) 108min Long ago, in a land far away, there lived a young buff hunter D’Leh (Steven Strait). He had a simple life killing mammoths, listening to the latest prophesy from the village shaman and falling in love with the beautiful Evolet…

Also Released - Film

13 Mar 2008

Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert 3D (U) 75min •• The titular pop queen on an insanely popular Disney Channel series and the teenage daughter of 90s country music star Billy Ray Cyrus go head to head in this flashy but economical…

Bill Griffith - Zippy: Walk A Mile in My Muu-Muu

13 Mar 2008

CULT STRIP (Fantagraphics) Having made his first appearance in Real Pulp Comix in 1971 Zippy is getting old. For the uninitiated Zippy is a polymath, free associating pinhead who wanders the consumerist besieged wastelands of the US. Griffith’s…

Lars and the Real Girl

13 Mar 2008

DRAMA (12A) 106min If, as the American columnist and poet Don Marquis noted, ‘fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in bad clothes’, then he should try a few hours in the sub zero Wisconsin town where Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) lives.

The Boss Of It All

13 Mar 2008

COMEDY (15) 99min Taking a break from vituperative deconstructions of US history, the ever playful Danish director, writer and producer Lars Von Trier brings us a comedy shot in Automavision, a process whereby the director chooses a fixed camera…

The Spiderwick Chronicles

13 Mar 2008

DRAMA/FAMILY/FANTASY (PG) 95min When newly divorced mother of three Helen Grace (Mary-Louise Parker) moves her kids to the secluded rundown Spiderwick estate, once owned by their great great uncle Spiderwick, the children are less than impressed. Twin…

DVD Round-Up

28 Feb 2008

March waddles into sight with a couple of movie behemoths. First up there’s the Stanley Kubrick Special Edition Box Set (Warner Home Video ••••), which includes special editions of 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut, The Shining…

The Edge of Heaven

28 Feb 2008

DRAMA (15) 121min With Goethe’s assertion that ‘We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens’ ringing in his ears, the seriously gifted Turkish/German filmmaker Fatih Akin (Head-On, Crossing the Bridge) delivers something completely…

The List surprise film goes down a storm

26 Feb 2008

On Saturday 23 February 2008 The List magazine presented its second ever surprise film at the Glasgow Film Festival. The film was Son of Rambow, which was written and directed by Garth Jennings of the filmmaking collective Hammer and Tongs (who made…

There Will be Blood

14 Feb 2008

EPIC/DRAMA (15) 158min As the American industrialist Jean Paul Getty noted, ‘Oil is like a wild animal. Whoever finds it keeps it.’ It’s a notion that lone silver prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) soon discovers when he finds black gold…

Inglorious Bastards

14 Feb 2008

WAR (15) 87min (Optimum DVD rental/retail) ‘War’ as the French statesman, physician and journalist Georges Clemenceau remarked ‘is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.’ But then again he never met this raggle-taggle bunch of escaped…

Also Released - Film

14 Feb 2008

Jumper (12A) 88min ••• Mildly interesting adaptation of Steven Gould’s hit sci-fi books about people called ‘jumpers’ who can transport themselves through time and space. Doug Liman (Mr and Mrs Smith, Swingers) directs with his usual admirable energy.

DVD Round-Up

14 Feb 2008

It’s that time of year when everything goes a little bit box set crazy. If you go on the right website (I suggest www.moviemail-online.co.uk) you can pick up newly released The Complete Coen Collection 1984-2004 (Spirit ••••) for around the £50. With…

Lars and the Real Doll - interview with Emily Mortimer

Glasgow Film Festival

14 Feb 2008

Emily Mortimer is laughing. ‘Bianca’s a very subtle actress and incredibly modest. She sits quietly, she waits. She doesn’t pace around, throw hissy fits or demand things. And her performance is incredibly low key.’ Bianca is Mortimer’s Danish/Brazilian…

The Italian

14 Feb 2008

DRAMA (12A) 99min It’s 2002 in a rundown orphanage in a remote, god forsaken corner of Russia. The boys live in hope of being picked out by one of few visiting couples keen on adoption. Sweet six-year-old Vanya (Kolya Spiridonov) is one day lucky…

The Lady Vanishes

(U) 95min

31 Jan 2008

Originally released in September 1938, a few days before Neville Chamberlain stepped off a plane at Heston airport waving the stationary which was to end his political career, Alfred Hitchcock’s splendidly entertaining pan-European railway caper looks…

Films for lovers

31 Jan 2008

First flush Wim Wenders’ 1987 urban romancier, Wings of Desire , about an angel willing to give up his winged status for the love of a homo sapien, is a great film for those wishing to take their relationship to a more ethereal level. If this isn’t…

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

(12A) 112min

31 Jan 2008

On 8 December 1995 Jean Dominique Bauby – the 43-year-old editor of French Elle magazine suffered a huge stroke. Twenty days later he awoke, unable to move anything apart from his mouth; he could also grunt and blink his left eyelid. He was diagnosed…

Out of the west

2008 Glasgow Film Festival programme launched

24 Jan 2008

On the day the 2008 Oscar nominations were announced, the stars and main players of Scottish film and media gathered at Glasgow Film Theatre’s Cinema One to hear some much more significant film news. On Tuesday 22 January the programme for the fourth…

DVD Round-Up

17 Jan 2008

Lovely late January. It’s dark, cold and you’re broke. Illness and recovery have become your best friends. Not to worry, there’s always the N oel Coward Collection (Second Entertainment •••) to get through. This is a star-studded collection of BBC…

Wim Wenders

4 Jan 2008

Exactly what it is about the films of Wim Wenders that tends to appeal to film lovers of all ages is difficult to pinpoint. Like his countryman Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wenders was born into the bankrupted GI Joe-colonised Germany at the end of WWII.

DVD Round-Up

4 Jan 2008

As Carly Simon sang, ‘we’re coming around again’. As this column marks its one-year anniversary, there are some great standalone DVDs hitting the shelves. 2008 is going to be a great year to rediscover the brilliance of the McCarthy-blacklisted US…

Preview 2008 - Film

4 Jan 2008

I lost count of the number of times the death knell rang for the traditional Hollywood filmmaking model last year. The ongoing writers’ strike, the collapse of the star system (due to exorbitant actor salaries) and increasingly low box office returns…

Preview 2008 - Oscar predictions

4 Jan 2008

Paul Dale gazes into his crystal ball and picks out those most likely to grab a gong this awards season Best Actor James McAvoy for his role in the adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement or Josh Brolin for his appearance in the Coen brothers’ version…