Reviews & features: Miles Fielder
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Free Men
11 May 2012
A Prophet's Tahar Rahim stars in worthy but flawed WWII espionage drama
Loosely based on real events, this espionage drama set during World War II focuses on the largely overlooked cooperation between Arabic immigrants and the French Resistance. Tahar Rahim (who shot to fame in A Prophet) plays a North African worker named…
The Innkeepers
11 May 2012
A genuinely involving and disconcerting chiller that thankfully eschews any trendy post-modernism
Having established his credentials as a serious genre fan with a spot-on homage to 80s horror movies in The House of the Devil, writer-director Ti West reaches even further back into the past with this slow-burning thriller. Like all good haunted house…
Le Quai des Brumes
4 May 2012
Marcel Carné’s 1938 romantic crime drama gets a well deserved restoration
One of the definitive examples of the ‘poetic realism’ style of French cinema of the pre-war and wartime years, Marcel Carné’s 1938 romantic crime drama has been treated to a well-deserved state-of-the-art restoration. Thanks to the digital dust-off…
Interview: Whit Stillman on Damsels in Distress
30 Apr 2012
One-time darling of 90s indie cinema returns after 13-year hiatus.
American indie filmmaker Whit Stillman was nominated for an Oscar for the script to his first film, 1990’s Metropolitan. He followed that with Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, which cemented his reputation as an idiosyncratic talent. Then he didn’t…
Apocalypse archives: Whit Stillman
17 Apr 2012
The Damsels in Distress director picks five films he’d save in an impending apocalypse
That Sinking Feeling (Bill Forsyth, 1980) ‘I wanted to include something Scottish. Aside from how enjoyable Bill Forsyth’s film about kids in rainy Glasgow is, I want to include it for its economy of means. To see how much was done with so little was…
Damsels in Distress
17 Apr 2012
Whit Stillman's return to filmmaking features wordy, droll dialogue but often inept direction
(15) 99min Following a 14-year break from filmmaking, American writer-director Whit Stillman returns to the big screen with another highly idiosyncratic comedy, one that audiences are likely to find either delightfully urbane or else utterly…
The Monk
17 Apr 2012
Vincent Cassel stars in Dominik Moll's visually impressive but otherwise inert thriller
(15) 101min It’s been seven years since Dominik Moll’s last film, but the talented filmmaker who made the blackly comic thrillers Harry, He’s Here to Help and Lemming, is back with his most ambitious film yet. Sadly, Moll’s adaptation of Matthew…
Le Havre
19 Mar 2012
Aki Kaurismaki's French language debut is a grimly funny working class drama
(PG) 93min Migrating south to shoot his latest feature in France seems to have lightened the mood of the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki, whose brand of deadpan humour has previously proved to be the key in crafting a series of delightfully…
Glasgow Film Festival: Why I love Gene Kelly
3 Feb 2012
Miles Fielder makes a song and dance about the charismatic movie star
For a film lover who hates musicals (this writer), the GFF’s Gene Kelly retrospective ought to be a hard sell. Telling stories through song and dance, Kelly’s forte (the latter of which endeavours earned him a special Oscar in 1951), is anathema to this…
Geoff Dyer - Zona
27 Jan 2012
The multi-talented humourist turns his able hand to film criticism
(Canongate) Having previously mashed-up fiction, journalism, essay, biography and travel writing, polymath and humourist Geoff Dyer once more defies genre with a book that’s one part film criticism, one part autobiography and several parts random…
Interview: Michelle Yeoh on filming The Lady
21 Dec 2011
Luc Besson biopic of iconic pro-democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi
Former Malaysian beauty queen Michelle Yeoh started her acting career co-starring with Jackie Chan in the likes of Supercop. She made her English-language debut opposite Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies before returning to China to…
The Phantom of the Opera
12 Dec 2011
Unmissable HD restoration of 1925 Rupert Julian version starring horror icon Lon Chaney
(PG) 77/114min There have been several adaptations of novelist Gaston Leroux’s classic macabre horror romance, among them the original 1916 silent German version, the 1943 Hollywood version with Claude Rains, the racier 1962 Hammer offering, Brian…
Black Pond
15 Nov 2011
Smartly observed and cleverly constructed British comedy drama is something special
(15) 83min This low budget British comedy drama is something special. Smartly observed and cleverly constructed, it’s at once funny and tragic and lyrical, and the deadpan humour is perfectly pitched with nicely underplayed performances from the…
You’ve Been Trumped
22 Sep 2011
Controversial doc on Donald Trump's Scottish golf course plan a triumph
(12) 95min Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand for the past few years, you’ll no doubt be aware of American tycoon Donald Trump’s controversial plans to build a golf course and hotel complex in an area of outstanding natural beauty and…
Life and Debt
22 Sep 2011
Heartbreaking and pertinent documentary about Jamaica's economic misfortunes
Made the year after the launch of the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel third world debt at the beginning of the new millennium, Stephanie Black’s agitprop documentary looks at the case of Jamaica. In 1977, fifteen years after achieving independence from…
You've Been Trumped - Anthony Baxter interview
22 Sep 2011
Director of Donald Trump doc on being shunned by Scottish film bodies
‘I live in Montrose and it’s 40 miles south of the Menie Estate, where Donald Trump was planning to build his golf course resort. I read the newspapers every day and I was surprised that the coverage was so one-sided. The other side of the story, as I…
Perfect Sense
14 Sep 2011
Dark yet sentimental romance set in an apocalyptic world
(15) 92min David Mackenzie’s seventh feature is, superficially, his most disturbing yet. That’s saying something given the Scottish filmmaker introduced himself and his penchant for dark psychosexual drama with his grim and gritty adaptation of…
Interview: David Mackenzie on Perfect Sense and You Instead
24 Aug 2011
Director returns from Hollywood to Glasgow to make two films back-to-back
Having made his Hollywood debut with his last film, Spread, a gorgeously sun-drenched but beguilingly bleak sex romp-cum-romance starring Ashton Kutcher that comes across like a modern-day American Gigolo, Scottish filmmaker David Mackenzie was set to…
Captain America: The First Avenger
4 Aug 2011
Despite a clumsy second half, the Cap sets the stage well for 2012's Avengers
(12A) 124 min Captain America might be subtitled The First Avenger, but he is, in fact, the last of the Marvel Comics superheroes to receive blockbuster movie treatment before he assembles alongside Hulk, Iron Man and Thor in next year’s superhero…
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
18 Jul 2011
The boy-wizard franchise goes out on a high
(12A) 130min It gives this critic great pleasure to confirm that the final film in the franchise adapted from JK Rowling’s boy wizard publishing phenomenon is among the top three of the eight-part series. Since the series hit the ground running ten…
Green Lantern
1 Jul 2011
Intergalactic special effects spectacle
(12A) 114min So many adaptations of superhero comic books have received the blockbuster treatment it’s now safe to say we have seen the best of them. And its questionable what more or different there is that can be done with the super-powered…
Julia's Eyes
1 Jul 2011
A very well made chiller in the stalk ‘n’ slash tradition
(15) 112min In addition to directing visionary adult horror-fantasies (The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth) and outstanding Hollywood blockbusters (Hellboy and its sequel), Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is also carving a second career for…
X-Men: First Class
30 Jun 2011
Latest in franchise makes clever use of Cold War-era setting
(12A) 132min The novelty of the Hollywood franchise reboot has worn thin, but this re-launch of the initially excellent adaptations of the Marvel comic book benefits from a canny central concept that takes the mutant superhero team back to their…
Outside The Law (Hors La Loi)
29 Jun 2011
Forceful thriller about 1950s Algerian freedom fighters
(15) 138min Franco-Algerian writer-director Rachid Bouchareb follows his hard-hitting Palme d’Or nominated WWII adventure Days of Glory with this similarly forceful thriller about Algerian freedom fighters in the 1950s. Like its predecessor, this…
The highs and lows of Harry Potter’s outrageous fortunes
28 Jun 2011
An evaluation of each of the films from the Harry Potter series
Having earned £6 billion worldwide, Harry Potter is the highest grossing film franchise of all time. And while the critical reception hasn’t always matched the commercial one (no Academy Awards yet), the films have been as successful as JK Rowling’s…
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