Paul Dale

Piranha 3D

16 Aug 2010

Alexandre Aja, the gifted French filmmaker who has so far had the cajones to tackle remakes of Wes Craven’s 1977 wilderness horror The Hills Have Eyes and feted J-horror Mirrors, finally tackles the big one – Joe Dante and John Sayles’ 1978 frat comedy…

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…

Apocalypto

(18) 138min

3 Jan 2007

Welcome to the jungle. A place where pierced savages josh and jest as they rip the flesh of a freshly speared boar. Life is simple, life is good, but trouble is hiding in the undergrowth and young family man Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) is about to go…

The best film websites

21 Jan 2010

If you work in an office and, like us, you love great movies you probably spend your lunch hour on any number of film-specific websites. So, after a totally unscientific survey of the cinema obsessives at The List, here’s our guide to what’s good and…

The Hot 100 2010 - Mark Millar, Kevin Bridges and Alasdair Gray take top 3 spots

Our annual chart of the people from Scotland being interesting, successful and creative

16 Dec 2010

The Hot 100 is a list of Scots who’ve made a sizeable creative splash in 2010. It includes musicians, artists, writers, actors, fashion designers, technological innovators, shop owners, festival directors, record label heads and one mad cyclist.

Stanley Kubrick & Rainer Werner Fassbinder

5 Mar 2009

This month two monsters of cinema meet in the central belt. As German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s takes over the Glasgow Film Theatre (courtesy of Goethe Institut) with a small selection of his better known films (Fear Eats the Soul, Effi Brest…

Hunger

Protest picture

30 Oct 2008

'Were you out last night my friend?' 'Is it that obvious?' I say pulling down a wrinkled lower eyelid to expose an eye as bloodshot as those of the two men opposite me. They are hot young actor Michael Fassbender - all fair brown hair, blue eyes, slight…

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…

Alan Davie at 90 - A colourful history

24 Jun 2010

Celebrating his 90th birthday this year, cherished Scottish artist Alan Davie is being honoured by a series of exhibitions and events in his native Falkirk. Paul Dale speaks to him

Jules et Jim

3 Jul 2008

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 Moreau), Austrian Jules (Oskar…

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…

David Fincher remakes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Here are five reasons to expect great things from the Fight Club and The Social Network director

3 Jan 2011

Fight Club and The Social Network director David Fincher returns with the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at the end of 2011, starring Rooney Mara. Here are five reasons to expect great things 1: Daniel Craig With the new James…

Winter's Bone

7 Sep 2010

(15) 100min With its all too familiar theme of familial collapse and undercurrents of social disgrace and fear of the local customs, Debra Granik’s excellent second feature film could be a British colonial horror from a distant age, and in some ways…

Samuel Maoz' Lebanon and New York, I Love You among GFF first week highlights

Glasgow Film Festival blog

26 Feb 2010

Hello good people, Paul Gallagher has taken a well-earned rest from the film festival and I will be filling in for him for the next few days. I can’t promise to be as reasoned, intelligent or as enthusiastic as Paul -- being the embittered old hack I am…

The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band)

4 Nov 2009

(15) 143min Writer/director Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher, Hidden) mainlines the sentiments of fellow Austrians Alfred Adler (the psychiatrist who first formulated ideas of the inferiority complex) and novelist Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach (who…

Profile - Riz Ahmed

16 Apr 2009

Born 1 December 1982 Background London Riz Ahmed graduated from Oxford with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics before training as an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama. He came to prominence playing Shafiq Rasul, a member…

Films for Valentine’s Day

5 Feb 2009

If you want to go and see a film with your beloved this Valentine’s Day you can chose between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s lovely 1945 Highland flit I Know Where I’m Going, a couple of Audrey Hepburn films (Funny Face and Sabrina) and four…

Lakeview Terrace

27 Nov 2008

THRILLER (15) 110min What could be safer than living next door to a cop? Well just about anything if that cop happens to be played by one of America’s leading black actors. Smug young marrieds Chris (Patrick Wilson) and Lisa (Kerry Washington) move…

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…

Elizabeth Blackadder

Brilliant retrospective of work by one of Scotland’s major artists

3 Aug 2011

Elizabeth Blackadder is a Dame, a Royal Academician and arguably Scotland’s most popular female painter and printmaker. A major retrospective of her work at Scotland’s biggest gallery space was only ever going to draw sighs of resignation from art snobs…

Takeshi Miike's 13 Assassins strikes a balance between measured character development and violent brutality

25 Apr 2011

(15) 126min Prolific to the point of insanity, unpredictable and blatantly controversial, Takeshi Miike is not your average Japanese filmmaker. His notorious body of work which includes loads of straight to video fare, the Dead or Alive trilogy, Ichi…

Step Up 3D

Other film releases, August 2010

3 Aug 2010

A group of underground street dancers from New York City team up with freshman Moose (Adam G Sevani) and find themselves pitted against the world’s best hip hop dancers in a life-changing showdown. Silly but euphoric and enjoyable street dance flick. If…

Magic Cinema: Croupier, Smokin’ Aces, House of Games and The Prestige

7 Jul 2010

It’s a kind of magic. The Edinburgh International Magic Festival and Filmhouse have joined forces to present a short season of classic magic movies. The strong, not too obvious quartet is Croupier, Smokin’ Aces, House of Games and The Prestige. Ticket…

The Railway Children screening to mark death of director Lionel Jeffries

31 Mar 2010

Fortieth anniversary screenings of this digitally restored print of Lionel Jeffries’ richly iconic 1970 family film starring Dinah Sheridan, Bernard Cribbins and a youthful Jenny Agutter. The film’s great and often (shamefully) overlooked writer…

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg

23 Aug 2009

(15) 104min (Sony DVD retail) Very welcome reissue of Peter Medak’s 1972 film adaptation of Peter Nichols’ hit West End play is a reminder that bad taste and suburban schadenfreude did not begin with Family Guy. Alan Bates and Janet Suzman are Bri…

The Creative World of Alan Davie

Remarkable mix of the dark and the sublime from much-loved Scottish artist

8 Aug 2009

Saxophonist and journeyman translucent Alan Davie is surely one of Scotland’s greatest living artists. At almost 90 years old it’s remarkable to think that this is the first exhibition of his work to embrace the breadth of his output in painting…

Antichrist

23 Jul 2009

Danish Dogme pack leader Lars Von Trier conjures up a slice of unbridled and unpleasant pantheistic horror that’s underlined by themes of grief and guilt. When middle class couple Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe’s son dies in a freak accident…

Mr Lautner Builds His Dream House

5 Mar 2009

With a new film and major exhibition celebrating his life and work, maverick architect John Lautner’s time may finally have come. Paul Dale looks back at the life of the man who shaped the look of US moviemaking’s hometown.

The Hot 100 2008

11 Dec 2008

It’s been a helluva year. 2008 has been a time of significant global change, socially, politically and culturally, with Scotland no exception. So here, for your delectation, is The List’s pick of the 100 people, places and things that rocked our world…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Precious Light - David Mach interview

Artist's first major Scottish exhibition in years at Edinburgh Art Festival 2011

6 Jul 2011

It’s just after 9am in Forest Hill in South London. The denizens of this leafy area have walked their children to school and boarded their commuter trains. In David Mach’s messy but unfussy two-floored studio, two handfuls of assistants and technicians…

Sex in art: Four examples of Scottish eroticism

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

1 Feb 2011

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

Edward Weston: Life Work and William Wegman: Family Combinations

A pair of fascinating photography exhibitions for the price of one

12 Aug 2010

These two fascinating exhibitions by two very different photographers challenge John Steinbeck’s belief that cameras should be disparaged because ‘they are so much more sure than I am about everything.’ Weston was the natural, a pioneer and a comrade…

Greenberg revealed at The List Surprise Movie at GFF

Glasgow Film Festival blog

28 Feb 2010

Hello. Don’t worry this is the last time you will have to read my witless meanderings, normal transmission with Sir Paul Gallagher will be resumed soon. So… The List Surprise Movie was…. (drum roll, drum roll) Greenberg. No it wasn’t Kick Ass or…

The Last Station

17 Feb 2010

(15) 112min It’s 1910 and the great Russian writer and aristocrat Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) has become a cult dissenting voice in Tsarist Russia. His writings and teachings on non violent resistance, state and property rights, chastity and…

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno

4 Nov 2009

(15) 100min Movie history is littered with the foetus corpses of abandoned projects and unrealised masterworks from Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis to Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon, John Waters’ The Confederacy of Dunces and (arguably most tragic of…

Mesrine: Killer Instinct (l’Instinct de Mort)

30 Jul 2009

Tracing a line from Mesrine’s disillusioning military service during the Algerian war to the beginning of his notoriety in 1972 (when he graduated to murder), the first instalment of this epic crime tale is derivative, energetic and hugely…

The Clyde: Films of the River 1912–1971

11 Jun 2009

As a new exhibition celebrating the River Clyde, as seen through amateur and professional films opens, Paul Dale salutes Glasgow’s cine-camera chroniclers.

Francesca Woodman

28 May 2009

Francesca Woodman created a remarkable body of work in her short life (she committed suicide in 1981 at the age of 22), some of which can currently be seen at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s Artist Rooms. This beautifully presented…

Christopher McDougall - Born to Run

30 Apr 2009

SOCIAL TRAVELOGUE In 2001, former war correspondent and much-injured running nut Christopher McDougall asked his doctor why his foot hurt so badly. The medic, an expert in sports medicine, informed McDougall that at over six foot tall, his body was…

Let The Right One In (Lat Den Ratte Komma In)

2 Apr 2009

DRAMA/HORROR Let the Right One In is a chilling Swedish coming-of-age story that breathes new life into a tired vampire genre marred by American high school teenagers and Christian lobbyist novelists (Stephanie Meyer, Anne Rice). It’s the early…

The Young Victoria

5 Mar 2009

ROMANCE/HISTORY Young Queen Victoria (Emily Blunt) kicks against the royal pricks but is tamed by a man whose name has become synonymous with penile piercing. Who would of thought it. Miserable old Queen Victoria was the proto feminist. As a young…

The Good The Bad The Weird

5 Feb 2009

WESTERN/ACTION Gifted South Korean filmmaker Kim Ji-woon takes on Sergio Leone’s greatest western and (unbelievably) emerges victorious. It’s the 1930s in the desert wilderness of Japanese colonised Chinese Manchuria and three treasure hunters are in…

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S Thompson

11 Dec 2008

(15) 119min Alex Gibney’s informative new documentary about the photojournalist and socio-political chronicler’s turbulent life and work obviously involved a lot of extra-curricular activity. Mapping Thompson’s trajectory from Twain and…

Summer

27 Nov 2008

DRAMA There is no Shakespearean ‘eternal summer’ for Shaun (Robert Carlyle) and Daz (Steve Evets). Shaun looks after wheelchair bound Daz in an impoverished ex-mining community in Derbyshire. Daz is mouthy, bitter and demanding while Shaun is silent…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford

29 Nov 2007

WESTERN (15) 159min Arch confederate and violent outlaw Jesse James was and is a gift for dramatists. With numerous appearances in literature, film, theatre and music, American folklore’s Robin Hood seems as unstill in his grave now as he was when…

Small Engine Repair - interview with Iain Glen

6 Sep 2007

It’s the eyes. I’m sitting in an Edinburgh member’s club, and I’m looking at the 46-year-old Edinburgh born actor Iain Glen. I’m trying to work out what has compelled me to follow his career since his remarkable turn as poet, artist and Barlinnie inmate…

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…

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…

Colin Hoult

Talented and energetic performer targets UK provinces

8 Aug 2011

Somewhere between Angry Boys and The League of Gentlemen lies Colin Hoult. A clearly talented and energetic performer, Hoult’s bag is the grotesquery of the provinces. Crap Welsh poets, crime stoppers from East Midlands, gleeful northern dogs and…

Ingrid Calame

Water water everywhere with only a doodle to drink

5 Aug 2011

A river runs through Ingrid Calame’s work. But this river has been drained and all that remains are detritus and old stains. Somewhere between Google Earth screen grabs, weighty childhood nature books with their own illustrative key codes and fey…

War correspondent Martin Bell to give Oliver Stone another chance

Martin Bell will be introducing Oliver Stone's Salvador at the EIFF

24 Jun 2011

‘I tend to walk out of films about wars that I reported on. I walked out of Oliver Stone’s Salvador when I first saw it in 1986 that’s why it will be interesting to present it and revisit it in Edinburgh. I remember he satirised a female reporter I know…

Tindersticks: Claire Denis Scores 1996–2009

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

21 Mar 2011

(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…

Scottish sex scandals throughout history

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

1 Feb 2011

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…

Private Road

12 Jan 2011

(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…

Profile: Nicole Grimaudo of Loose Cannons

Her latest role is in Ferzan Ozpetek’s family-in-crisis comedy, set in Italian city of Lecce

14 Dec 2010

Born 22 April 1980, Caltagirone, Sicily Background As a 15-year-old Grimaudo made her professional acting debut in a Rome production of The Cherry Orchard. In the same year her first screen role came in the children’s’ animated film Sorellina e…

Dream Home

Selected release, Fri 19 Nov

16 Nov 2010

(18) 96min Property values – that great middle class dinner party discussion topic of choice – and the slasher movie may not seem to be ideal bedfellows but prolific Hong Kong Chinese director Pang Ho-cheung (Isabella, Exodus) certainly brings a…

Filmhouse Steve McQueen screens selection of actor's finest films

Papillon, Love with the Proper Stranger and Bullit among highlights

10 Aug 2010

Arguably the coolest American screen actor of the last 50 years, McQueen gets his six of the best to help us make it through another damp August. Highlights include brutal prison drama Papillon, Love with the Proper Stranger – actor/director Robert…

Desperately Seeking Susan 80s dress up screening set for Glasgow

Get those leg warmers out for this themed screening

10 Aug 2010

Take a trip back to the 1980s with this late night 80s dress up screening of Susan Seidelman’s lively feminist life swap comedy starring Rosanna Arquette and then burgeoning singer and actress called Madonna. Leg warmers and big hair are…

Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth at Edinburgh Art Festival

Paul Dale finds out more about their Festival installation

15 Jul 2010

Following a rich tradition of surveillance art, Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth’s festival show aims to turn Edinburgh into a city under observation. Paul Dale peers through their lens

British Film Institute Akira Kurosawa Centenary

7 Jul 2010

This very impressive British Film Institute touring programme finally reaches the west. Among the many highlights are a new digital restoration of Rashomon plus rare outings for his 1948 gangster flick Drunken Angel and his 1952 dissection of class and…

Predators

7 Jul 2010

(15) 106min Half decent return to B-Movie form for Predator franchise in which a group of elite warriors are hunted by members of the merciless alien race. The above average cast (Adrien Brody, Alice Braga, Danny Trejo and Topher Grace) and knowing…

Greenberg

10 Jun 2010

(15) 107min The worst thing about a mid life crisis? You are only half way through. Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is 40 years old, unemployed, house-sitting for his rich brother and a minefield of mildly autistic behaviour. Obnoxious…

Flickers

28 May 2010

(12) 300min (Network) Made for British television in 1980 and starring the then bankable pairing of Bob Hoskins (between Pennies from Heaven and The Long Good Friday) and Frances De La Tour (fresh from the set of hit comedy Rising Damp) this…

The Calling

14 May 2010

(15) 109min Engrossing melodrama set in a nunnery where nothing is quite as it seems. The Calling is written and directed by Jan Dunn, whose previous films include festival favourites Gypo and Ruby Blue. A great veteran cast includes Brenda Blethyn…

Cleaning Up the Streets - A day with Edinburgh's environmental wardens

15 Apr 2010

Paul Dale spends a day with Edinburgh’s environmental wardens, and finds the job of the recycling police is a far cry from Miami Vice.

Killing Curves: Lynn Ahren

22 Mar 2010

Killing curves Scottish artist Lynn Ahrens’ figure painting carries murderous intent. Paul Dale chats to him about his work Glasgow-born, Edinburgh-trained, and under- appreciated painter Lynn Ahrens likes to talk about the human figure. ‘My work has…

Holocaust Memorial Day

19 Jan 2010

The anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp is marked this year by moving new German drama And Along Come Tourists about one young man’s experiences working at the concentration camp among all the tourists. There will also…

Cracks

4 Dec 2009

(15) 104min Jordan Scott, daughter of Ridley Scott (nepotism, it’s a wonderful thing) follows the promise of her shorts Jonathan and Portrait with this ludicrous and feeble attempt to posit William Goldman’s Lord of the Flies in a 1930s girls…

Eating Raoul

19 Nov 2009

Those cheeky folk from the Monorail Film Club get their teeth into a bit of human flesh with this rare screening of Paul Bartel’s 1982 comic cult gem about sex and cannibalism. Introduced by Lindsay Hutton of The Next Big Thing website…

An American Werewolf in London

23 Oct 2009

(15) 97min Second John Landis directed reissue to be re-released this fortnight. Still good after all these years. Selected release from Fri 30 Oct.

Sweden's No Mind Festival - Three Miles North of Molkom

10 Sep 2009

It’s 5pm on a Monday afternoon and I’m crying. I’m sat on the grass mat floor of a big tent and I’m weeping on the shoulder of Carine, a beautiful Swedish lady I have known for only a few days. She’s crying too and our waterborne grief and guilt is…

Glasgay! Film Festival

Sorting the wheat from the chaff at the upcoming festival

20 Aug 2009

Faced with the same dreary bunch of films that have already passed through Aberdeen and Edinburgh and soon to go on to Inverness it's difficult to get excited about the Glasgay! Film Festival programme but there are a few bits of rough worthy of your…

Plastic Fantastic - GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra

The action figure is now a movie star. But why stop there?

30 Jul 2009

It’s all come a little too late for me. It’s been a long time since I put my armless and legless Action Men (or GI Joes as they were called in America) in a shoebox and sent them back to Palitoy Ltd for repair. You could do that kind of thing in those…

Sugar

11 Jun 2009

DRAMA Premier Baseball’s Latin American slave trade route and the immigrant experience go under the microscope in this offbeat and compelling character study from the makers of 2006’s Half Nelson. Miguel Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) aka Sugar is a…

You the jury

28 May 2009

You may have noticed that here at The List, we love movies. We don’t care if they’re contemporary or old, blockbuster or art house, we just want to witter on about them, compare them to each other and rejoice in all those spools of celluloid accumulated…

Female Prisoner Scorpion Trilogy

2 Apr 2009

CRIME/ADVENTURE/BOXSET No one makes films like the Japanese filmmaker Shunya Ito, and his early 1970s exploitation film trilogy about the travails of a sexy young female prisoner Matsu (Meiko Kaji) are very likely to be his abiding legacy, in the…

Che: Part Two

19 Feb 2009

WAR/BIOPIC (15) 127min Che Guevara’s final fatal campaign in Bolivia gets bold and bleak treatment in the second part of Steven Soderbergh’s extraordinary bio-historical epic about the ultimate revolutionary. It’s 1967 and Guevara (Benecio…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

One Minute Wonder - Minute Masters

29 Nov 2007

One year ago The List and media production company Metro Ecosse launched our first ever short film competition. One Minute Wonder was an entry-level screenwriting competition open to anyone aged over 16 who lives in Scotland. It was also the first…

Shutter

19 Jun 2007

In lieu of a forthcoming US remake, this half arsed 2004 Thai ghost story is getting an overdue and limited release. Driving home after getting drunk with a few of his old friends, photographer Tun (Ananda Everingham) and his girlfriend Jane…

This is England

(18) 102min

23 Apr 2007

Taking its name from the only single to be released from The Clash’s final, hideously vulgarised LP Cut The Crap (by manager Bernard Rhodes, who synth-popped each of the 12 tracks to within an inch of their lives), Shane Meadows’ new film is about what…

DVD Round-up

29 Jan 2007

Shy, prone to stage sickness, deep depression and melancholia the British comedian Frankie Howerd was still the funniest man ever tp have been born in the city of York, England. A brilliant, stammering pontificate of a stand-up comedian, Howerd’s talent…

Red Road - feature

Red or dead

2 Oct 2006

In these lean times for Scottish film it is women who are at the vanguard of quality, truth and all that should be right in cinema. Think of Lynne Ramsay, who made Morvern Callar, or Shona Auerbach, who was responsible for Dear Frankie, or Alison…

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…