First daily report from the Edinburgh International Film Festival, with a review of the opening film Tommy's Honour. Not a great start.

Read more at The 405 here

​After his detour to the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man 3, the king of the postmodern action-comedy, Shane Black, returns to knockabout noir with The Nice Guys

Read it at The 405 here


Based on Kim Barker's equally caustic and comic memoir of her experiences covering Operation Enduring Freedom, The Taliban Shuffle, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot explores the particular thrills and challenges encountered by a female war correspondent.

​Read more at The 405

A PTSD-afflicted soldier on leave, but desperate to return to warfare, is granted his wish during a bodyguard job for a politically connected family in Alice Winocour's paranoid thriller.

Disorder is yet another addition to a long, tired line of spartan thrillers featuring troubled, quiet men of violence. Leavened by great acting and spectacular sound design, though, it packs enough suspense to be more engaging its peers.

Read more here

Vaudeville was the nest that birthed cinema, as Edison and the Lumiere brothers moved from kinetoscopes to audience projections in vaudeville houses. In return, film and television would dethrone staged variety entertainment, turning Orpheum theatres into RKO cinemas, and push it from the dominant form of mass entertainment in the early 20th century into kitsch eccentricity. In this context, The Show of Shows acts as cinema’s mea culpa. The film is a discreetly structured montage of late 19th- to mid-20th century archived footage of vaudeville, fairground and circus performances, scored with original music from Sigur Ros and composer Hilmar Orn Hilmarrson. Introduced first to performers backstage during construction, preparation and rehearsal, we then join the audiences funnelling into the tents to watch an assembled variety show medley, arranged into innominate thematic sections. Tumbling, lion-taming, blind-boxing, burlesque striptease and other antiquated arts are brought back from the dead via the mass medium that helped kill them.

Read the whole review here at The Flaneur

Mask-wearing, axe-wielding murderers and a cast progressively downsized in a creaky old mansion. Not the stuff of horror revitalisation, but Adam Wingard's You're Next does succeed in organising well-worn elements into an interesting shape. Mixing black comedy, minimalist brutality and self-awareness for infrequent rewards, a standard slasher formula is proven effective for what one hopes is the last time.

We open in black with the screams of a women in distress, screams revealed to be carnal rather than homicidal in nature. This is one of the smarter tricks the film plays, so, if it doesn't deliver, you have your early waterline. This cold-open couple is our introduction to the murderous villainy afoot. Intruders clad in plastic animal masks (fox, sheep, tiger, if it matters) write YOU'RE NEXT on the window in the woman's blood as a message to the man, which is promptly reaffirmed when he is macheted in the face. The fact that this message faces outside toward the camera rather than inside towards the intended reader is a stylised touch of titling that I found bothersome. Perhaps these psychos didn't practise backwards writing on their notebooks in school like I did.