It’s a wonder at this stage in his career that 93-year old Linguist Noam Chomsky is able to show up to any event at all, let alone engage in an hour-long discussion concerning complex topics at the behest of the paying British public, so his remote appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival was bound to […]
You never want to hear an artist discuss the intricacies of their process too much: an overabundance of detail will detract from the intrigue of the piece and remove some of the capacity the audience has to attach their own views to the work. There is an element of this idea captured in the phrase […]
Predictability is often a quality in a movie’s plotting that leaves it open for derision. In film, the audience should be taken on a journey that they aren’t expecting, revelling in the twists and turns of the narrative as it is revealed. In the case of Official Competition, directing duo Gaston Duprat and Mariano Cohn’s […]
There are moments in Husband where co-directors and real life couple Josh Appignanesi and Devorah Baum genuinely seem to dislike each other’s presence, and yet by the end of the movie, we see the pair unable to hold in their laughter, gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes, – an image captured by the third member […]
It all started with a cigarette. You never know what sort of wise guys you’ll meet at the Edinburgh Fringe, and in this case, last week I happened to bump into two promising New York comics sharing a smoke outside Stramash, who told me about their show at the Hill Street Theatre: Hey, That’s My […]
Good cinema, in my mind, should tell you its own unqiue personal story whilst also having enough narrative strands for audience members to attach their own experiences onto. Full Time (A Plein Temps) does this, for the most part, aiming by its writer/director Eric Gravel’s admission, to capture the stressful lives of those who commute […]
There is a moment in Diem Ha Lee’s 2021 Documentary Children of the Mist where the camera lingers on a shot of the blossom on a tree for a while, and at that moment a sense of hesitation seems present. The camerawoman seems intent on finding, and staying close to, some mark of beauty amongst what has, […]
In the middle of the most recent spells of uncharacteristically Scottish heat when I perhaps would’ve been better off sunning myself on the Costa Del Forth. I instead found myself crammed into a tight, hot sweaty room at the top of The Counting House in Newington, perched on the end of a row of classroom […]