Our Midnight – Glasgow Film Festival 2021 Review Scott Wilson March 4, 2021 Reviews Comparisons to Before Sunrise are inevitable when two protagonists spend an evening wandering a city contemplating life. While Linklater’s trilogy is a more polished piece of work, Our Midnight doesn’t...
Undergods – Glasgow Film Festival 2021 Review Scott Wilson March 3, 2021 Reviews If a society is constructed by the stories it tells, the world in Undergods is an unsettling and sparse one, with humour dryer than the detritus strewn across this barren and brutalist land. With a colour...
Spring Blossom – Glasgow Film Festival 2021 Review Scott Wilson March 2, 2021 Reviews France’s low age of consent and wave after wave of abuse emanating from its artistic community are unavoidable in Spring Blossom. Director-writer-lead actor Suzanne Lindon wrote the film at 15, plays a...
Black Bear – Glasgow Film Festival 2021 Review Scott Wilson March 2, 2021 Reviews As Aubrey Plaza’s Allison sits down to write in a luxurious cabin by a foggy lake, Black Bear introduces its first part, framed in a manner which suggests its events precede Allison putting pen to paper....
Iorram (Boat Song) – Glasgow Film Festival 2021 Review Scott Wilson February 28, 2021 Reviews The first feature documentary entirely in Gaelic, Iorram (Boat Song) is a visually poetic documentation of Outer Hebridean fishing community culture. Rediscovered and restored audio recordings dating back to...
Victim(s) – Glasgow Film Festival 2021 Review Scott Wilson February 28, 2021 Reviews There’s a little too much going on in Victim(s), a drama based on the true events surrounding a teenage boy stabbing three classmates, killing one in the process, supposedly over a new girl at school....
Creation Stories – Glasgow Film Festival 2021 Review Scott Wilson February 24, 2021 Reviews What happened is never as interesting as why it mattered. Some biopics, such as the recent Schemers, are like Wikipedia pages when they should be novels. Creation Stories goes some way to rectifying this. A...
Da Capo – Glasgow Film Festival 2021 Review Scott Wilson February 21, 2021 Reviews Tae-il (Hong Isaac) reconnects with Ji-won (Jang Haeun), former bandmate and now teacher at a music school. Her devotion is to her teenage pupils, four of whom have started a metal band, hoping to win a local...
Minari – Glasgow Film Festival 2021 Review Scott Wilson February 20, 2021 Reviews Away from Jacob’s (Steven Yeun) farmland, shaded by trees and dampened by patches of water, minari – an East-Asian herb – planted by grandma Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung) grows. “Minari is truly the best,”...
The Queen of Black Magic – Review Scott Wilson January 29, 2021 Reviews This delightfully creepy Indonesian horror has real drama and depth. Beneath the surface of the familiar setting (a group of people gather in a remote location, no working telephone) is the weight of...
ORWAV’s Top 20 Films of 2020: #2 – Portrait of a Lady on Fire Scott Wilson December 31, 2020 Analysis, Features, Top 10 Released less than a month before the UK entered lockdown, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a memory from the Before Times. Not only is it about so much of what has been taken from us this year, but the film...
iHuman – Review Scott Wilson December 18, 2020 Reviews Mercifully, an artificial intelligence-led revolt against humanity didn’t happen in 2020. If iHuman is to be believed, it’s not a matter of if, but when. A documentary which functions as much as a horror...
Schemers – Review Scott Wilson September 24, 2020 Reviews Everyone growing up in a nothing town dreams of making something of it. For director Dave McLean, it was throwing a disco to impress a girl, which led to gig after gig, booking the likes of Simple Minds, The...
Disney’s Live Action Remakes Are in Need of Life Scott Wilson September 3, 2020 Analysis, Features, Opinion Disney’s 1994 The Lion King is full of life, death, and the harmony in between. At a tight 89 minutes, it never runs out of steam, and its colour palette is as vibrant as its song book. Part of the "Big...
Spree – Review Scott Wilson August 16, 2020 Reviews What, really, can be called authentic in a time of social media personas and rampant reality television? For Kurt Kunkle, it’s live-streaming The Lesson, a twisted mission acted out as a Spree driver, a taxi...