In LOVELESS, Zhenya and Boris are going through a vicious divorce marked by resentment, frustration and recriminations. Already embarking on new lives, each with a new partner, they are impatient to start again, to turn the page – even if it means threatening to abandon their 12-year-old son Alyosha. Until, after witnessing one of their…Continue readingLoveless
Franco-Senegalese film-maker Alain Gomis has created a film portrait in an ambient social-realist style, showing us a woman called Félicité (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu): a single mum of a tearaway teen boy Samo (Gaetan Claudia), for whom she must stay strong. She is scratching a living with her music, evidently bruised and humbled by the…Continue readingFélicité
This sounds like a fab film, I hope everyone can make it this month! “The firecracker story of a six-year-old girl, her friends and single mother in a scuffed motel outside Walt Disney World in Orlando.” – Danny Leigh, The Guardian. June 29th, 7.30 at the Hallhill Sports centre in Dunbar, show starts promptly at…Continue readingThe Florida Project
In this stellar documentary, Gianfranco Rosi contrasts the lives of the desperate thousands landing on the shores of a Sicilian island with the everyday existence of the locals. An Academy Award® nominee for Best Documentary Feature and the first nonfiction film to ever win the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, Fire at…Continue readingFire at Sea
Forced to leave their apartment due to a dangerous construction project in a neighboring building, a young Iranian couple moves to the center of Tehran where they become embroiled in a life-altering situation involving the previous tenant. The director Asghar Farhadi won his second Oscar in a row for this film ( the first was…Continue readingThe Salesman
Moscow, 1953: when tyrannical dictator Joseph Stalin drops dead, his parasitic cronies square off in a frantic power struggle to be the next Soviet leader. Among the contenders are the dweeby Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), the wily Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), and the sadistic secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale). But as they…Continue readingThe Death of Stalin Friday
“Bicycle Thieves” is so well-entrenched as an official masterpiece that it is a little startling to visit it again after many years and realize that it is still alive and has strength and freshness. Given an honorary Oscar in 1949, routinely voted one of the greatest films of all time, revered as one of…Continue readingBicycle Thieves Friday
“In these uncertain times, we need storytellers who can turn a tale of conflict and hardship into a symphony of love and friendship that endures through all the pain. I doubt that I will see a better film than ‘Moonlight’ this year.” Our first film of 2018 is Moonlight “A coming-of-age story about…Continue readingMoonlight
This painful, complex, beautifully acted and inexpressibly sad drama from Ira Sachs is about something that looms large in real life, but never usually gets acknowledged in the movies in any but the vaguest way – banal, undignified embarrassment over money, and the deadly serious damage this causes. This film is very different from the general run…Continue readingLittle Men
“Focusing on a mother and daughter besieged by forces both worldly and otherwise in a Tehran apartment block, Under the Shadow presents a gripping portrait of an independently spirited woman shackled by sharia law who becomes more scared of the demonic forces tormenting her daughter than of the lashes threatened by her rulers or of fire falling…Continue readingUnder The Shadow (15)