Five to see at GFF, 26 Feb: Top Gun & more

Feature by Film Team | 26 Feb 2016

A day of horror movies (FrightFest), artists' films (Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog, Ben Rivers' The Sky Trembles...) and bombastic 80s homoerotica (Top Gun) shown on the biggest screen possible

FrightFest

GFT, all day (also 27 Feb)

This weekend of scary movies began last night with The Forest, and five more grisly delights with creepy titles like Cell, Anguish and The Hexicutioners will play out today (six if you include retrospective screening Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? [GFT, 10.30am] – that searing portrait of marriage is more terrifying than 90% of horror films). We can’t guarantee quality here, as those who made it along to last night’s screening will testify; some of the films will be great, some terrible. The real draw, however, is FrightFest’s gorehound audience, who always create a fun movie-watching atmosphere.

The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers

GFT, 3.30pm

The title here may be difficult to remember, but don’t let that put you off buying a ticket, as this is reportedly the most accessible piece of reverie yet from madcap experimentalist Ben Rivers. He’s once again blurring the line between fact and fiction with this Sahara-set fever dream following real-life filmmaker Oliver Laxe on the troubled production of his latest movie. Rivers' films shouldn’t just be seen on DVD or in gallery spaces, they deserve the big screen. Playing from 35mm.

Heart of a Dog

CCA, 6.30pm

The Queen of New York cool, Laurie Anderson's first feature in decades is a dreamy montage letting us into the mind of the idiosyncratic artist and her relationship with her pooch. The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis called it a film “about telling and remembering and forgetting, and how we put together the fragments that make up our lives – their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping headline news.” Not to be missed.


Lucky Star with Live Score

Mackintosh Queen’s Cross, 7pm

This recently rediscovered melodrama from 1929 gets the live score treatment from Glasgow-based vocalist Ela Orleans. If you’ve made it to any of the GFF events held at this Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed church last year you’ll know it’s a stunning venue in which to watch a movie.

Top Gun

IMAX, 7.30pm

A silver lining to Tony Scott’s untimely death in 2012 is that critics have been rethinking his bombastic style. Was Top Gun brainless Regan propaganda, or an expressionistic exercise in pure cinema? Judge for yourself on the (very) big screen.

Here's Quentin Tarantino – acting in Sleep with Me – explaining the subtext behind Scott’s film.


Glasgow Film Festival: runs until 28 Feb. Keep up to date with what's going on at Glasgow Film Festival in The CineSkinny – in print at Glasgow Film Festival venues and online at theskinny.co.uk/film/cineskinny

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