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The 30-year-old Scots schoolboy, plus story of a-ha 10 films to see at the Glasgow Film Festival
GLASGOW Film Festival is almost a grown up. Born in 2005, it is entering its late teens in rude health, despite last year’s Covidenforced interruption which saw it diverted online. After a hugely successful 2020 festival (just before the first lockdown), expect a bounce back this year with 10 world premieres, four European premieres, 65 UK premieres and 13 Scottish premieres. Some films will also be available online and a few will also screened in other parts of the country as the festival broadens its reach.
But, really, it’s a chance for Glasgow to celebrate its long love affair with the movies. Here are 10 that might tempt you to buy some popcorn.
THE OUTFIT
This year’s opening gala film, a twisty thriller starring Mark Rylance, Zoey Deutch, Simon Russell Beale and Johnny Flynn, arrives trailing comparisons to the movies of the Coen Brothers. That’s quite the thing to live up to. But Graham Moore’s debut movie arrives in Glasgow on the wings of good reviews at the Berlin International Film Festival so here’s hoping.
Despite the Englishness of much of the cast, the film is set in 1950s Chicago, with Rylance playing a tailor who turns a blind eye to the gangsters who use his shop as a drop-off point. Or he does until he doesn’t have a choice anymore.
Moore won an Oscar for his script for The Imitation Game, which saw Benedict Cumberbatch play Alan Turing. Here, as well as co-writing the script, Moore turns director in this period piece which riffs on gangster movies. As you’d expect, given the story, the costumes look impeccable. The Outfit screens at the Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT) on Wednesday, March 2, 7.15pm and Thursday, March 3 at 3pm
WHERE IS ANNE FRANK
On paper, Ari Folman’s animated film sounds a curious beast. It follows a young girl called Kitty trying to find Anne Frank in near-future Amsterdam, a quest cross-cut with animated recreations from Frank’s wartime diary (which, you may remember, was addressed to an imaginary friend called Kitty).
It’s quite the conceit, but given the power and ambition of Folman’s previous animated film, Waltz with Bashir, perhaps we are in safe hands with this unconventional approach to one of the great heroines of Holocaust literature. This is the UK premiere. Where is Anne Frank, Cineworld Renfrew Street, Glasgow, Sunday, March 6, 3.30pm and Monday, March 7 at 3.15pm
MY OLD SCHOOL
In 1993 Brandon Lee enrolled at Bearsden Academy. He was not just another Scottish teenager, however. He wasn’t a teenager at all. Lee was a medical school dropout aged 30 whose real name was Brian MacKinnon. MacKinnon’s Walter Mitty story has now been turned into a documentary film by Jono McLeod, a former class mate, in which the film maker speaks to MacKinnon’s fellow pupils and Alan Cumming lip-syncs MacKinnon’s own testimony. The result is an innovative sleight of hand that includes animated sequences and a few famous voices all helping to tell an incredible story.
My Old School, GFT, Thursday, March 3, 8.15pm and Friday, March 4, 3pm. There will be a Q&A with the director and stars after the Thursday screening.
MAIXABEL
Director Iciar Bollain has been a familiar face at the Glasgow Film Festival over the years and she returns in 2022 with Maixabel, a film about political violence and restorative justice in contemporary Spain. Based on real-life events, it begins with the assassination of a Basque politician in 2000 by ETA.
A decade later, the politician’s wife Maixabel, played by Blanca Portillo, is invited to meet the men who killed him.
It’s an intriguing premise and the resulting film could make for an interesting double bill with Pedro Almodovar’s recent Parallel Mothers which also tackled historical memory.. Maixabel, GFT, Tuesday, March 8, 5.45pm and Wednesday, March 9, 3.30pm. Ician Bollain will take part in a Q&A session after Tuesday’s screening
BENEDETTA
Arch provocateur Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Robocop) returns with his unsurprisingly controversial new movie which conflates sex and spirituality in the 17th-century. The story of a nun (the titular Benedetta, played by Virginie Efira) who is not only having intense visions of Jesus but also conducting a lesbian affair with a new arrival at the convent (played by Daphne Patakia). This, as you might imagine, does not go down well when it is discovered.
With Charlotte Rampling and Lambert Wilson among the supporting cast, Verhoeven’s latest is as sumptuously mounted as ever. The question remains, is this anything more than a relatively high-budget example of a nunspolitation movie? Here’s a chance to find out.
Benedetta, GFT, Monday, March 7, 8.30pm and Tuesday, March 8, 3pm
HOLD YOUR FIRE
It’s 1973. Four young African
Americans bustle their way into a sporting goods store in Brooklyn. Their plans are thwarted when the shop is surrounded by the NYPD and so the four men are trapped along with 11 hostages.
A bloodbath seems to be looming as the hours pass. But when police commissioner Patrick Murphy decides to negotiate with the men (much to the disgust of some of his police officers) the situation (and the film) takes a twist. Enter Harvey Schlossberg, a traffic cop turned NYPD psychologist.
Schlossberg is just one of the talking heads in Stefan Forbes’s smart, fastmoving documentary that comes on like a Sidney Lumet movie. Forbes sketches out the situation and then spends the rest of the film complicating the picture, taking in police culture, the Nation of Islam and the long-term effects of PTSD. It’s film that grows as it goes, and the ending is gripping.
Hold Your Fire, GFT, March 11, 8.30pm and March 12, 1.30pm and online via Glasgow Film At Home