Edinburgh Cinema

Edinburgh’s cinemas have their own, different feel. When I visit them, I’ll be writing about both the film and the place, giving you the organic experience. Film critics on the big scale can’t really cater for this, so I hope my reviews bring something extra in this respect.

Howl's Moving Castle

Edinburgh Cinema
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Howl's Moving Castle Imagine a fairy tale Europe where the world wars never happened, a steampunk Europe of pre-war Dresden, Krakow, Paris, Budapest, et al, merged into one of narrow cobbled streets and wooden-beamed buildings and courtyards of different colours; imagine Hanseatic harbours of tall gables and market stalls with azure seas. Imagine f...
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Ready Player One

Edinburgh Cinema
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Ready Player One As a strapline summary of this Spielberg-directed film, it's difficult to top the 'coruscating explosion of pop-culture eye candy' as used by Variety magazine. Ready Player One , about people's virtual escape from slum-like conditions into a fantastic online world, is a visual feast and sums up so much of Spielberg's film-making: g...
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Princess Mononoke

Edinburgh Cinema
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Princess Mononoke They're doing a Hayao Miyazaki season at the Cameo , which means lots of gentle, Japanese animé of otherworlds and ethereal environments. Yesterday I went to watch Princess Mononoke  (1997), which to my mind is the darkest and most brutal of the Miyazaki offerings. Immediate questions occur in reflection, as they did before I...
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Unsane

Edinburgh Cinema
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Unsane A look of distress crossed a friend's face when I talked about the concept of this movie. I understand why even better now. Unsane 's premise hints at a film that could go badly wrong, if exploited: of a girl locked up in a psychiatric hospital, who believes her former stalker has followed her there, in fact has found work there, to be with ...
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Mary Magdalene

Edinburgh Cinema
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Mary Magdalene With mainstream films about Jesus, there's usually a fault line to contend with, between faith and secular interpretations: do you treat Jesus as a secular, historical figure, or the Son of God? Do you show the miracles as real? Or go for ambiguity, showing just enough for an open interpretation to satisfy different audiences? These ...
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Red Sparrow

Edinburgh Cinema
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Red Sparrow This was not the film I was expecting, but the one I deserved. I had entered the screening room guessing at a female equivalent of James Bond, with its lead Jennifer Lawrence mixing fantasy and stupid violence. Instead, what I got for my assumptions was the channelling of John le Carre's brutalist Cold War vibe, of torture, double-cross...
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A Fantastic Woman

Edinburgh Cinema
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It's the most talked about trans movie since the problematic The Danish Girl  (2016), but A Fantastic Woman already has superior foundations through its casting and plot. Unlike Eddie Redmayne's depiction of Lili Elbe, the predicament of trans actress Daniela Vega's three-dimensional Marina does not involve a reason or fateful spark to ex...
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The Square

Edinburgh Cinema
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The Square The trailer made this film fascinating; the two and a half hour cinema experience was a different, restless kettle of fish. The Square is an interesting if overly-long exploration of the managed edginess of a Copenhagen museum exhibition, and how its control – specifically the curator's control – pales to the weird fucked-upnes...
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Lady Bird

Edinburgh Cinema
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Lady Bird It covers the ground many trans women can't talk about, myself included, and I was reluctant to watch this film, and confront a past narrative that I'll sadly never share. Lady Bird is a coming-of-age movie in which Saoirse Ronan's Christine – aka self-styled Lady Bird – experiences the travails of her senior high school year, with boys a...
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Black Panther

Edinburgh Cinema
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Black Panther If Superman were black, would the narrative be different? Like President Obama trying to get things done against a hostile senate, would Superman face resistance and conspiracy theories from Donald Trump, if he were from an inner-city African-American community? Would he still be seen as protector of the people, or threat? These were ...
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The Shape of Water

Edinburgh Cinema
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The Shape of Water The protagonist doesn't speak, and neither does the one she loves. Her confidante is a single man in late middle age, struggling in vain for work. These are not the heroes you expect, the violence that punctuates the film isn't there to make you swoon in awe. The Shape of Water isn't a movie whose like you will have seen before, ...
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Walk With Me

Edinburgh Cinema
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Walk With Me It was during this film that I came up with the term chomper to describe the way such entertainments make me feel. Some forty minutes into this documentary (or was it thirty minutes, or twenty, or ten?), I felt myself become drowsy. Silently, and yet in a feverish desperation, I sought out the chewing gum in my bag that would help...
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Bad Education by Pedro Almodovar

Edinburgh Cinema
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Bad Education by Pedro Almodovar Mention director Pedro Almodovar and it's hard not to think of depictions of women and the LGBT community that are sensitive, sympathetic, and ultimately uplifting. All these virtues are captured in Almodovar's most famous work, All About My Mother (1999), with its representation of two trans female prostitutes. Agr...
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The Post

Edinburgh Cinema
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The Post A shady US President trying to undermine the media, is all you need to know about this film to see it hits the zeitgeist. Like the Oscar-winning Spotlight (2016), it's a tale of newsrooms and investigative reporting serving as a crucial pillar of democracy. Like Spotlight too, it's a heavyweight ensemble, Spielberg behind the len...
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Edinburgh Cinema
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi 15.12.17 I would watch this film again. Not for the lightsaber fights, which were strangely banal, or for the romance that develops between Boyega's Finn and Tan's Rose, which glowed slightly at the end. In fact not for the many shoulder-shrug participants of this movie: Oscar Isaac's ace pilot Po and his one-dimensional ch...
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The Party

Edinburgh Cinema
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The Party 03.12.17 It finished so abruptly, there was hardly time for disappointment. The Party is a film that imagines what a soiree in London looks like. With the dialogue slightly dull, I stopped thinking about the minimal plot and wondered how much these characters would earn: Kristin Scott-Thomas's House of Commons Minister would have a salary...
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Battle of the Sexes

Edinburgh Cinema
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Battle of the Sexes 25.11.17 This was a sweet, uplifting experience, of a face-off in the zero-sum game of patriarchy, where on this occasion the right person wins. Emma Stone is a strong Billy Jean King, her battle for women's respect blended within a tender LGBT love story. Steve Carell is a surprisingly likeable Bobby Riggs, a little-boy-lost wh...
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Justice League

Edinburgh Cinema
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Justice League 19.11.17 I'm still not sure why they needed Aquaman. He has a trident, and he swims really fast; fine, but the single oceanic scene comes and goes in the shake of a fish tail, and for the rest of the movie, he really is a fish out of water. I want more female superheroes, and fewer macho, gruff-voiced bodybuilders, whose presence in ...
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The Florida Project

Edinburgh Cinema
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The Florida Project 12.11.17 Like Harry Potter and the Enid Blyton stories, The Florida Project is partly a world seen from the perspective of children. Around them on the sun-drenched strip of cheap motels and garish junk food cafes, little girls and boys play together, are noisy, and seem not to realize the challenges faced by the adults. Providi...
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Murder on the Orient Express

Edinburgh Cinema
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Murder on the Orient Express 05.11.17 Murder on the Orient Express . It's a film about the luxury train, with a murder on it. What else is there to say of this enjoyable, nothing-special film? I went for visual stimulation and escapism and I think it's what I got given, like caviar or some other overrated thing. I knew I would get a glimpse of how ...
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