Edinburgh Film Festival — Le Donk

It’s been five years since director Shane Meadows and his long-term on screen collaborator Paddy Considine last worked together. That was for Dead Man’s Shoes, a violent revenge drama that took Considine’s natural, wired intensity and amped it up to an uncomfortable degree. Considine tends to specialise – for Meadows, at least – in charismatic, explosive figures and while his run of movies together with Meadows has proved thrilling and memorable, you might have cause to wonder where they could take their collaborations next.

Edinburgh Film Festival — Humpday

Quite where American indie cinema can go next, so thoroughly has it been co-opted by the mainstream, is a big question. Writer-director Lynn Shelton offers, at least, a moderately novel solution with Humpday. A bromedy about two friends who set out to make a gay porn movie, it feels at times like a mumblecore take on a Judd Adaptow movie. Although, of course, while Apatow’s films ultimately serve to reinforce the strengths of the masculine dynamic, Shelton seems to set out to dig around in the frailties of the male ego.

Edinburgh Film Festival — The Architect

For a film that opens with a woman walking through the snow, it’s perhaps apt that the subjects under scrutiny here are a collection of cold, rather wintry folks. The woman in question, Hannah (Sophie Rois), is a single mother living in a remote Alpine village, whose discover of the body of an elderly woman sets up the narrative of this excellent, slow-burning domestic drama.

Edinburgh Film Festival — Turn It Loose

I'm up in Edinburgh, in case it needs some minor clarification, for this year's Film Festival. As usual, there's a satisfyingly wide array of movies to see, and I'll be blogging a couple of times a day between now and Tuesday to report back the highlights. Presently, I'm off to try and see Kathryn Bigelow's Hurt Locker, an Iraq War drama that's got many of my peers up here in quite a lather of excitement. Meantime, here's one of the best movies I've seen so far.

Noah & The Whale film to get first public screening!

Twickenham based folk rock band Noah & The Whale are to screen their new film 'The First Days of Spring' for the first time in the Film & Music Arena at the Latitude Festival next month.
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