Reviews & features: Film

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2013: Surprise Movie candidates

The EIFF Surprise Movie is a closely guarded secret - here's what we think could be showing

Filth The James McAvoy-starring Irvine Welsh adaptation is a bit of a long shot, considering it isn't scheduled for general release until October. That said, the news broke recently that Filth was coming out in Scotland a week before anywhere else in…

New trailer for Not Another Happy Ending starring Karen Gillan

The Glasgow-shot romcom features the Doctor Who star as an author suffering from writer's block

Following the announcement that quirky indie romcom Not Another Happy Ending will be the closing gala film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, we've just been given a first glance at the trailer. Not Another Happy Ending features the big…

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2013: the best horrors

The Conjuring, Frankenstein's Army and Outpost 3 among our best bets for horror at EIFF 2013

The Conjuring Having reconfigured the modern horror template with Saw back in 2004, James Wan turned his attention to ghost stories, first with the less-than-perfect Dead Silence, then with the more successful (but still a bit iffy) Insidious. The…

Disney Pixar’s Monsters University announced for Edinburgh International Film Festival 2013

The family film will screen at the festival three weeks before release in the rest of the UK

Edinburgh International Film Festival audiences will be among the first in the UK to see Disney Pixar’s latest offering, Monsters University. The Family Gala 3D screening will take place on Sun 23 Jun in the Festival Theatre, with an exclusive schools…

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2013: the best comedies

Frances Ha, Oh Boy and Old Stock among our top picks for comedy at EIFF 2013

Frances Ha This being a film by Noah Baumbach (Greenberg, The Squid and the Whale), you'd probably expect this to be a comedy of the 'bittersweet and poignant' vein rather than, say, all-out slapstick. And you'd probably be right to a certain extent…

Chris Waitt interview

Edinburgh International Film Festival

If someone gave you money to interview all your exes and find out what you did wrong in those relationships, would you do it? Filmmaker Chris Waitt didn’t hang around for an offer and approached Warp X with the pitch for his documentary A Complete…

Watch: trailers for the Richard Fleischer retrospective at EIFF 2013

Edinburgh International Film Festival to screen six of the American director's films

The Edinburgh International Film Festival has started releasing the first few snippets of information about its 2013 programme. As well as featuring Karen Gillian romcom Not Another Happy Ending as its closing film (read what Gillan says about it in our…

Edinburgh International Film Festival - Jeanne Moreau

Born between the wars to an English chorus girl mother and a French restaurateur father, Jeanne Moreau was born to play what feminist film critic Molly Haskell called ‘the glorious fantasy, appealing to both sexes, to men as eternal mistress, to women…

The Edge of Love - Sharman Macdonald interview

Edinburgh International Film Festival

At the programme launch of the 2008 Edinburgh International Film Festival artistic director Hannah McGill thanked the makers of The Edge of Love for providing her with the perfect opening night film. What McGill no doubt meant by this was that The Edge…

Take One Action Film Festival 2012 returns to Glasgow and Edinburgh

Groundbreaking festival to open with Martin Scorsese produced film and features workshops and Q&As

Returning to Glasgow and Edinburgh for the fifth year in a row, the Take One Action Film Festival’s aim is as much to celebrate great work that is being done around the world to fight injustice, as it is to provoke audiences to get up and do something…

Weekender - Henry Lloyd-Hughes and Jack O’Connell interview

Film charting 1990s British rave scene

“We’re a bit like a double-act”, quips Jack O’Connell, referring to himself and his co-star Henry Lloyd-Hughes, and it proves true as they talk to me. They’re ostensibly discussing Weekender, which has it’s World Premiere at this year’s Festival, but…

Convento - Jarred Alterman interview

Portrait of Dutch artist family and kinetic sculpture

Jarred Alterman, director of the documentary Convento, takes me round the tie-in exhibition at Teviot Row House, full of the kinetic sculptures by Christiaan Zwanikken that populate Alterman’s dreamlike film. Passing a gang of creepy, animated and…

Turin Horse - Béla Tarr interview

Hungarian director's final film takes Nietzsche's madness as starting point

Iconic Hungarian director Béla Tarr was in Edinburgh to present his latest and reportedly final film, Turin Horse. The film is inspired by an event often reported as the beginning of Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental breakdown. The philosopher is said to…

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2011 opens with an Oirish whimper (not a bang)

65th festival gets underway despite disappointing opener The Guard

So the 65th edition of the Edinburgh International Film Festival is now open. It opened last night, a balmy, spitty Wednesday evening, with a screening of John Michael McDonagh’s decidedly patchy Irish comedy policier The Guard starring Brendan Gleeson.

Profile: Philip Seymour Hoffman, director and star of Jack Goes Boating

The much-respected actor screens his directorial debut at the EIFF

Born Fairport, New York, 23 July 1967. Background Known as the ‘character actor’s character actor’, Hoffman has been a jobbing actor since the early 1990s. After playing bit parts in television shows, shorts and features, Hoffman got his breakthrough…

Books on cinema - round-up

How the Movie Brats Took Over Edinburgh, Tough Without A Gun, The Faber Book of French Cinema

As is always the way in Scotland, summer is kind of here, and now is the time to lie in the grass with that growing pile of tosh novels. But let’s face it, you are going to win a lot more kudos from your film-obsessed mates if you create a tower of…

True to Life

A tie-in with the Edinburgh International Book Festival at the Filmhouse

This small tie-in season with the Edinburgh International Book Festival features Ron Mann’s new documentary about novelist Margaret Atwood In the Wake of the Flood and Murray Grigor’s 2009 film Space & Light Revisited about St Peter’s Seminary in…

Nick Cave makes Irregular appearance in Edinburgh

No, you didn’t just hallucinate that. Nick Cave’s popping down to the Roxy. This Canongate Books/Edinburgh International Film Festival multimedia event brings the Aussie music/film/literature icon, who will be reading from his novel, The Death of Bunny…

Monsters director Gareth Edwards and producer Graham King at EIFF

Edinburgh International Film Festival Blog

Saturday 19 June The days, as Calvin & Hobbes astutely observed, are just packed. Saturday began with two great things: the first was Toy Story 3, which was possibly the best threequel I’ve ever seen (I’m meeting its two chief animators later today…

Ben Miller - Huge respect for the nicest man at the EIFF

Edinburgh International Film Festival Blog

Friday 18th June. It’s my first day at Edinburgh Film Festival 2010; the opening party is a thing of blurry half-memory and the real business of movie-watching has properly begun, but the atmosphere is a joyous one: the sun is shining, and the weather…

EIFF 2010 Ones to Watch

Perestroika A poetic and haunting essay film set on the Trans-Siberian railway, covering the themes of loss and memory, past and present. Filmhouse, Fri 25 Jun, 5pm. The Black Panther Surrealist Mexican noir featuring a private eye, a 1950s…

The Illusionist opens EIFF 2010 - Sylvain Chomet interview

The year after French animator Sylvain Chomet knocked out cinema-goers at the 2003 Edinburgh International Film Festival with his wildly eccentric and utterly charming double-Oscar nominated debut feature, Belleville Rendez-vous (aka The Triplets of…

Edinburgh International Film Festival announces programme

The Edinburgh International Film Festival was announced today. The programme Includes 135 features from 33 countries and includes 23 World Premieres. Highlights from the programme include opening film Away We Go from British director Sam Mendes on 17…

The Escapist - Brian Cox interview

Edinburgh International Film Festival

As Brian Cox welcomes me into the interview room at London’s Gibson Guitar Studio, he points out a picture of Syd Barrett, ‘a son of Cambridge’, on the wall. It’s been just a few months since the Dundee-born actor was treading the boards on Broadway to…

Best of the Edinburgh International Film Festival

When the 62nd Edinburgh Film Festival begins on 18th June it will be more than the just the programme of films and number of celebrity appearances that is under scrutiny. This year is also the first for the festival in its new home in the cultural…