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Mission
George MacKay gives a viscerally intense performance in a new film from For Those in Peril’s Paul Wright. He plays a troubled restaurant worker called Dylan, who snaps during his asinine corporate “performance assessment” and heads off on an anguished and violent journey of despair into his own past.
Borges and Me
It is a semi-legendary moment in Scottish literary history … when the great Argentinian poet and author Jorge Luis Borges was taken on a chaotic tour of the Highlands in 1971 by a hapless young PhD student, the blind author insisting on having everything described to him. This sweet and charming comedy, adapted from Jay Parini’s book, brings it to life, with Chilean comic actor Luis Gnecco playing Borges.
Snapshot
This wayward and mischievous black-comic horror in flickering monochrome suggests that a mysterious Victorian inventor created cinema long before we all thought, and even found a way of recording lip-sync sound on a wax cylinder. And this cameraperson is shooting a fly-on-the-wall true-crime documentary about … attempts to unmask Jack the Ripper.
These Violent Delights
Scottish Ballet gives us an engrossing, transformative dance riff on the action of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The ballet is fierce, athletic, knotty and sensual; it is not a filmed event under a proscenium arch but a film that inhabits its own theatrical space. A radically impressionistic compression, performed with commitment and style.
Pretty Babies
The time-honoured subject of Hollywood’s dark underbelly of shame, and the link between sex work and show business, is the subject of this stark drama from debut feature director Tyler-Marie Evans. Two young women escape their oppressive home town, believing that LA’s streets are paved with celebrity gold, and find themselves face to face with the sex industry.
The Education of Jane Cumming
German film-maker Sophie Heldman gives us an exhilaratingly candid and intelligent movie about the real-life libel case from 19th-century Scotland that inspired The Children’s Hour, about two female teachers accused of being lesbians in a homophobic age. Fiona Shaw has a delectable cameo as a haughty Scots aristocrat.
Her Private Hell
The dark master himself, Nicolas Winding Refn, is back with a bizarre new fantasia moonscape of dread, a twist on the British 60s pulp shocker of the same title by Norman J Warren. The film is set in a nightmarish hotel, occupying the inner space between hallucination and memory, a place where a film production is being discussed. The film executes a slow dervish swirl of hypnotic, toxic strangeness.
Queen at Sea
Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall give unbearably powerful and award-winning performances in this drama about dementia, the endgame of care and the decisions that need to be taken when the spouse-carer is as vulnerable as the patient. To theatre historians, the Courtenay/Calder-Marshall pairing might poignantly recall their Hamlet and Ophelia on stage in 1968.
Northbound/In Conversation: Bruce Dern
Seeing a Hollywood legend in the flesh as well as on screen is something not to be missed. Bruce Dern, the iconic star of Silent Running, Coming Home and Nebraska is appearing live on stage to talk about his life and times. His new film is also screening: in Northbound, he is an elder scallywag who recruits his prissy grandson to help him break out of his care home and head for freedom in Canada.
I Want Your Sex
Gregg Araki, standard-bearer of new queer cinema and director of Mysterious Skin and Kaboom, now brings us a transgressive BDSM kink-positive neo-noir romp. Olivia Wilde is imperious dominatrix Erika, a black-clad contemporary artist and erotic conceptualist who has a complex relationship with her bedazzled assistant, muse and sub Elliot, played by Cooper Hoffman.
