Film reviews and more
★★★★☆ Joining the latest throng of female filmmakers baring their souls – and bettering their mainstream equivalents – through homegrown autobiographical independent films is the talented Desiree Akhavan, whose debut feature Appropriate Behaviour (2014) is something of a doyenne in […]
★★★☆☆ This year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival drew to a close with Iona (2015), Scott Graham’s follow-up to his much praised debut feature Shell (2012). Set against the beautiful, isolated terrain of the titular Scottish island, Iona retains much of […]
★★★★☆ Two Edinburgh regulars, Mark Cousins and Mania Akbari, have collaborated to produce an insightful film-essay exchange, their differing filmmaking styles bursting with ideas and inspiring new thought in each other in Life May Be (2014). The project was conceived […]
★★★★☆ Based on a short story by David Constantine, British director Andrew Haigh’s poignant drama 45 Years (2015) is led by two terrific central performances from Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling. Kate and Geoff are preparing for their forty-fifth wedding […]
★☆☆☆☆ Talulah Riley takes three tasks in this Scottish rom-com, acting as star, writer and director. Sadly, her feature debut Scottish Mussel (2015) is a vacuous as they come, without so much as a morsel of skill being put on […]
★★☆☆☆ Bafta-winning filmmaker Jane Linfoot makes her feature debut with The Incident (2015), a well-shot yet clinical and emotionally stunted psychological drama that fails to develop into anything particularly gripping. Annabel (Ruta Gedmintas) and her husband Joe (Tom Hughes) relocate […]
★★★★☆ Damon Gameau’s feature documentary about the detrimental effects of refined sugar and excess fructose on our health is both educative and entertaining. The central message of That Sugar Film (2015) is that the calories from sugar behave differently from […]
★★★☆☆ Doug Aitken’s Station to Station (2014) immediately states its intent. This is to be “a journey through modern creativity”, shot over 24 days, spanning 4000 miles from Atlantic to Pacific. It’s not specified that this will be across the […]
★★★★☆ John Maclean’s Slow West (2015) is prairie poetry. It might be set in the Wild West, where it’s always high noon and desperados with big irons will drop a person cold between swigs of firewater, but in this conceptually […]
★★★☆☆ Watching Peter Bogdanovich’s She’s Funny That Way (2014) is a somewhat bittersweet experience. It’s terrific to see the great almost man return from TV movie purgatory with renewed focus to craft a lovely, quick-witted throwback with big stars on […]
★★★★☆ In a whole other league to the regular slew of sex comedies usually churned out by the Hollywood machine – that are often simply raunchy for the sake of it – The Overnight (2015) – director Patrick Brice’s follow-up […]
★★★★☆ Paul Haggis, director of the Oscar-winning Crash (2004), was a struggling young writer in a failing relationship when he first came across a man on a street corner offering self-help advice via a book called Dianetics. Written by pulp […]