Rambles about the wonderful world of wrestling.
The Legend of Barney Thomson is born from the city it is set in. It’s humour, people and language are so Glaswegian that you wonder how it will go down to any audience not based in Scotland. Robert Carlyle’s debut film as a director is as Scottish as he is and sees both him and Emma Thompson steal the show.
It’s become a commonly held view that Pixar have been in a bit of a slump. Brave and Monsters University were hardly bad films, but they missed that bit of magic that has always made Pixar so special. While Cars 2 sadly goes down as one of their first genuine flops. However, with the release of Inside Out Pixar are proving that rumours of their demise were greatly exaggerated.
Some films revel in action and set pieces. Massive blockbusters often want you to remember what happens in the film. They want you to stare agog as characters leap from building to building. Dodging death by the skin of their teeth. Then there are films that just create a world and a setting that you want to be a part of. They make you fall in love with their landscapes and the characters that inhabit them. Song of the Sea manages to do that and so much more.
Sometimes you want to get deep and dark. Then other times, you want to watch a small yellow creature shout banana in a funny voice. I don’t know what it says about me that I tend to be much more into the second option.
Seeing dead people is not new ground for cinema. The iconic line from The Sixth Sense is almost as famous as it’s twist ending. However, very few people have made this supernatural power as dark and gritty as David Blair does with his thriller, The Messenger.
The great thing about the Edinburgh International Film Festival is the chance to stumble upon something that it is a pretty safe bet to say you would never watch otherwise. Surreal Hungarian comedy, Liza, The Fox-Fairy, probably falls into that category. It’s director Károly Ujj Mészáros‘s debut feature and according to the man himself, isn’t much like other Hungarian films.
A lot of people have played Sherlock Holmes. The Holmes character is such a part of British literature and film history, that it is easy to forget that he doesn’t actually exist. It’s a popularity that doesn’t seem likely to fade, with Benedict Cumberbatch bringing him to a whole new generation in Sherlock. Therefore, it’s kind of surprising that Sir Ian McKellen has never played him before.
The elevator pitch for Turbo Kid is ‘Mad Max on a BMX’ and with that simple sentence you begin to understand just a sliver of the lunacy in this debut full length feature from directorial trio François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell. Set in a post apocalyptic 1997, it is an homage to 80’s action movies and sets out purely to entertain.
Skyfall wasn’t just responsible for elevating James Bond back to the top of the Hollywood totem pole. It can also take credit for doing the same for spy movies in general and this year there seems a bit of a resurgence in the genre. We’ve already seen Kingsman and later in the year we will have The Man From U.N.C.L.E. In the here and now we have Spy, from future Ghostbusters director Paul Feig.
Dinosaurs are fucking cool. That is just a fact. Everyone has at some point been filled by fascination when thinking about these giant creatures, which lived before our time on this planet. It’s that feeling of wonder which makes Jurassic Park one of the most iconic films of all time. It’s a feeling that Colin Trevorrow has been tasked with recapturing in Jurassic World.
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