The X in Scotland is a short film looking at what the life and words of Malcolm X means to young Black and Muslim Scots. Shot in the 1990s, many interviewees mention the racist murder of Axmed Sheekh, who was attacked and killed on Edinburgh’s Cowgate. Nowadays it would be Sheku Bayoh’s name they would…
Pleasant story of friendship on the frontier. Cookie teams up with King-Lu and they try to make a living out in Oregon in the 1820s. King-Lu is an ideas man and an entrepreneur, and Cookie is, well, a cook and a baker. When the rich English dandy in charge of the territory brings the first…
Boring. Like, almost criminally dull. I mean, I can see what he was going for, a noir action/romance, like Sin City meets John Wick. But, ugh. The gravelly voiced narration, a genre staple, is just cringey, feeling not like the main character’s inner thoughts but the filmmaker having to speak directly to the audience over…
Rosa’s Wedding is a rom-com about loving yourself. Rosa is the lynchpin of her family, holding everyone together and being taken for granted more than a little. She takes the lion’s share of looking after her lonely elderly father on behalf of her siblings. She helps out her divorcing brother with his child care. She…
Yer Old Faither is about the life of John Croall, a Glasgow native who emigrated to Australia, to the little town of Whyalla. It is a film which traces out the extraordinary impact of an ordinary life. Or not entirely ordinary, because Croall was a bit of a character. The film traces his professions and…
Surge is about a guy having a total mental breakdown. Ben Wishaw is outstanding in this nerve-searing, idiosyncratic, spontaneous feeling performance. He looks like every interaction he has with someone in this film is using the last thread of his patience. In November, I got a wisdom tooth out, and the pain was white electric,…
The Dissident tells the story of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. It is gripping, enlightening, and moving. This film was quite an eye-opener for me, going into a wealth of context I did not know. I followed the story in the news at the time, but my reaction was “Brutal regime murders journalist. No mystery…
Dreams on Fire follows a young girl as she leaves her strict and sheltered home in the countryside to pursue her dream of becoming a dancer in the big city. Her journey takes her through the various dance subcultures of Tokyo, from contemporary and tap, to headbanging to heavy metal, to R&B and urban freestyle,…
Absolutely fantastic! What an inspiring, interesting, in-depth documentary. Tina traces the life of Tina Turner, world renowned superstar. This is definitely one of the better music biopics I’ve seen, really doing a marvellous job of pulling together a wealth of sources to tell the story of an extraordinary woman’s life. I knew Tina from her…
A guy gets a white girlfriend and everything turns to shit. A Brixton Tale is about Leah and Benji, teenagers from opposite sides of the city, who meet and begin a relationship. But the pressures of racism and class are present from the very beginning and threaten doom. I spent the whole of this film…