A recovering alcoholic returns home to a remote Scottish island in The Outrun. The life of 29-year-old Rona (Saoirse Ronan) has been derailed by her alcoholism, which destroyed both her career and relationship with her boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu). After undergoing 90 days of rehab, Rona returns home to the Orkney Islands of Scotland, where…
Alan Cumming stands in for a legendary student of Glasgow’s Bearsden Academy in My Old School. In 1993, a new student named Brandon Lee enrolled in Bearsden Academy, a posh high school in the rich end of Glasgow. Claiming to be a Canadian, who moved in with his grandmother after the death of his opera…
Joel Coen goes solo with this stylized adaptation of the play by William Shakespeare with The Tragedy of Macbeth. Following a victory on the battlefield, Thane of Glamis Macbeth (Denzel Washington) and his cohort Banquo (Bertie Carvel) are greeted by Three Witches (Kathryn Hunter), who tell Macbeth that he will be the next King of…
The Queen of Scotland fights for her claim to the British crowd in Mary Queen of Scots. After a number of years as the Queen of France, the recently widowed Mary Stuart (Saoirse Ronan) returns home to Scotland and stakes her claims as the heir of the British throne, currently held by Queen Elizabeth I (Margot Robbie)….
Indie Spotlight is a series focusing on reviews of independent films Based on the novel by Irving Welsh (Trainspotting), Filth focuses on Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy), a chauvinist Scottish police officer, who is determined to get promoted to inspector. With his young partner Ray Lennox (Jamie Bell), Bruce sets off to solve a…
Scarlett Johansson plays a seductive alien temptress in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, which is loosely adapted from Michel Faber’s 2000 novel of the same name. Laura (Johansson) is an emotionless alien, in the form of attractive female, who drives around Scotland in a white van, looking to lure unsuspecting males back to her home…
The music industry is no stranger to hoaxes. In fact, the story of the Milli Vanilli, the pretty-boy duo of the late 1980s, who were exposed as lip-syncers, probably remains the most infamous hoax of music history. However, compared to Silibil n’ Brains, the main subjects of Jeanie Finlay’s documentary The Great Hip-Hop Hoax, Milli…
After seeing the latest Disney/Pixar collaboration Brave, I realized how difficult a film it is to market without giving away some major plot details. Indeed, the film I saw today was quite different than the film that was advertised in the trailers. That said, I still enjoyed the film that I saw. Without giving away…
I’ve probably said this a million times by now, but Doomsday is what you get when you take films such as 28 Days Later, The Road Warrior, The Warriors, and Escape from New York and combine them with a dash of Excalibur. So yeah, the film is not that original and that is probably its…
