Fifteen of the Best at Glasgow Film Festival

What makes Glasgow Film Festival so inviting is its palpable concern for the paying public; its chief goal is that its audience has a rewarding time at the pictures. This might seem an obvious requirement for a film festival, but it’s not always the case. Often festivals, especially ones that have reach the size that Glasgow has grown to over the last decade, are more interested in the talent they can squeeze on to the red carpet on opening night, or the kudos that a world premiere might bring. Any rewards the audience might get from the films is a secondary concern – purely incidental. Not so at the GFF. “When we're putting together the programme we always think of it this way,” GFF co-director Allison Gardner told me last year: “What’s your point of access as an audience member?”

This year’s wide-ranging GFF programme, from opener While We’re Young, the latest from master of toe-curling angst Noah Baumbach, to Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s moral comedy Force Majeure, is bursting with these audience access points. Are you an art-house fan? There’s the latest from slow cinema posterboy Lav Diaz (From What Is Before) and French king of the austere Bruno Durmont – who’s set to surprise everyone with screwy comedy Li'l Quinquin.

Looking for one-off cinema experiences? GFF's special events lineup includes a screening of Murder on the Orient Express combined with a murder mystery night and a glitter-strewn showing of Strictly Ballroom at Kelvingrove Art Gallery. Like to use the festival to catch up on some classic cinema? There’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior in Imax, a celebration of Glasgow-set Small Faces complete with a cast reunion and a dozen chances to see Ingrid Bergman shine on the big screen in this year’s retrospective Here’s Looking at You, Kid.

Traditionally we pick ten must-attend films on the lead up to the festival, but, since this year’s programme is especially winning, here are 15 films you’d be mad to miss...

Appropriate BehaviouR

GFF opens with the new film from Noah Baumbach, who’s reportedly back to his prickly best after the effervescent Frances Ha. American-Iranian filmmaker Desiree Akhavan is clearly a kindred spirit: her debut Appropriate Behaviour is delightfully urbane and spiky, a modern New Yorker comedy that finds hilarity in heartbreak.

Appropriate Behaviour, 19 & 20 Feb

Catch Me Daddy

Music video whizz Daniel Wolfe’s debut film is reportedly as raw and visually inventive as his band promos – that’s me sold.

19 & 20 Feb

Clouds of Sils Maria

The super-cool Olivier Assayas seems to be back in Irma Vep territory for this study of stardom, which centres on the intense relationship between a movie star (Juliette Binoche) and her assistant (Kristen Stewart).

22 & 23 Feb

Dazed and Confused + Roller Disco

That's what I love about Dazed and Confused, man. I get older, it stays brilliant. Miraculously, GFF have come up with a way to improve on Richard Linklater’s masterpiece: a roller disco screening.

28 Feb

Dreamcatcher / Love Is All

Kim Loginotto is the UK’s finest documentarian and she brings two typically great films to GFF. Her stock-in-trade is searing and unsentimental portraits of indomitable women, and Dreamcatcher – a study following several Chicago prostitutes going straight – fits right in her wheelhouse. Love Is All, an archive film celebrating love on the silver screen, is a change of pace, but no less inspiring.

Dreamcatchers, 28 Feb | Love Is All, 27 Feb

Eden

Mia Hansen-Løve's fourth feature is an intimate epic telling the history of the French Touch music scene through one DJ's bloodshot eyes. Following the brilliant Father of My Children and Goodbye First Love, Eden makes it three corkers in a row for this young French filmmaker.

28 Feb & 1 Mar

Girlhood

Talking of French filmmakers who can do no wrong: Girlhood is another compelling coming-of-age drama from Céline Sciamma (Tomboy, Water Lillies). It follows a shy young black girl who comes out of her shell when she falls in with a streetwise girl gang. Like its protagonist, it's as tender as it is tough.

24 & 25 Feb

A Girl Walks HOME Alone AT Night

In this strange and gorgeous horror-western, a hijab-wearing blood-sucker is cleaning up the streets of Bad City, a black and white phantasm of American and Iranian pop culture.

27 & 28 Feb

It Follows

David Robert Mitchell follows up his dreamy and sensitive debut, The Myth of the American Sleepover, with the nightmarish and sinister It Follows. The premise is brilliant: a curse is being passed from teen to teen via sexual intercourse. Think of it as an STD version of Night of the Demon or Ringu.

27 & 28 Feb

Land Ho!

This road movie about an old geezer odd couple (one a boorish loudmouth, the other sarcastic and zen) on an Icelandic getaway is a deceptively loose hangout movie, beautifully nuanced and endlessly witty.

24 & 25 Feb

Mommy

Québécois enfant terrible Xavier Dolan’s fifth film, an ebullient melodrama about a hyperactive teen and his trainwreck single mom, is vivid and bursting at the seams with emotion.

23 & 24 Feb

Phoenix

Christian Petzold’s emotionally complex psychodrama, set in post-war Berlin, channels Vertigo as a mutilated Holocaust survivor is reinvented by the husband who may have given her up to the Gestapo.

22 & 23 Feb

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

Who could resist a film with that title? Or one directed by the brilliantly distinctive master of deadpan, Roy Andersson (You, the Living).

22 & 23 Feb

The Samurai

The werewolf myth gets a queer makeover in this feverish thriller, which sees a novice cop accidentally unleash a samurai sword-wielding, cross-dressing maniac on his rural community. Its homo-erotic subtext is the most blatant since Top Gun.

27 & 28 Feb

Stop Making Sense

Watching this peerless concert film, it’s impossible not to fall for Talking Heads. Jonathan Demme’s camera loves their charismatic frontman Byrne, and you will too. For an encore? Just play the whole movie again.

20 Feb

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More from The Skinny:

More on the GFF 2015 programme

Variations on a Theme: John Carpenter interviewed

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