Edinburgh
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Edinburgh 2015: ‘Life May Be’ review
★★★★☆ 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 when the distributor, Second Run asked Cousins to write something in response to Akbari’s One.…
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Edinburgh 2015: ’45 Years’ review
★★★★☆ 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 anniversary. They have no children and live in a small rural village near the Norfolk…
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Edinburgh 2015: ‘Scottish Mussel’ review
★☆☆☆☆ 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 display, and lacking any sign of either drama or humour. Ritchie (Martin Compston) is a…
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Edinburgh 2015: ‘The Incident’ review
★★☆☆☆ 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 to a house sheltered in the woods. Their affluent, metropolitan life is interrupted by the…
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Edinburgh 2015: ‘Chicken’ review
★★★☆☆ The debut feature from Joe Stephenson, Chicken (2015) – premièring at the Edinburgh International Film Festival – is based on the stage play of the same name with an adapted screenplay co-written by original author Freddie Machin and Weekend (2011) actor Chris New. After a shaky start, this British drama set against the sweeping…
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Edinburgh 2015: ‘Big Gold Dream’ review
★★★☆☆ All set to find an appreciative audience on BBC Four’s long-running Storyville strand, Big Gold Dream: Scottish Post-Punk and Infiltrating the Mainstream (2015) – which premièred at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival – takes a pleasant and interesting trip down memory lane, specifically to the late 1970s where punk and post-punk where making a…
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Edinburgh 2015: ‘Beyond the Lights’ review
★★★☆☆ Denied a theatrical release, Gina Price-Blythewood’s Beyond the Lights (2014) instead receives its UK premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival before landing on DVD. While it’s certainly no masterpiece, this entertaining drama has more than its fair share of surprises; its sweetly familiar narrative awarded emotional heft by its two leading performance and some…
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Edinburgh 2015: ‘Welcome to Me’ review
★★★★☆ Mental health is a tricky topic to tackle sensitively in film, no less so when that particular film is a comedy. Shira Piven’s Welcome to Me (2014) achieves the impossible in delivering laughs all the while carving out a central character with a disorder who’s not only well defined, but also an honest reflection…
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Edinburgh 2015: ‘The Hallow’ review
★★★☆☆ Corin Hardy’s third feature The Hallow (2015) – screening in the Night Moves strand of this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival – is an impressively moody horror set within a deep and dark Irish forest, before losing itself to mediocre effects and a long, on-the-run finish. Adam (Joseph Mawle) and Claire (Bojana Novakovic) relocate to…
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Edinburgh 2015: ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’ review
★★★★☆ Fantasy becomes near unbelievable reality in Sundance hit The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015), director Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s astonishing third feature film which sees him make a deserved return to the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Formed around the real life experiment conducted in 1971 by professor Philip Zimbardo (Billy Crudup), the film is often excruciating…