Scottish Film Events: January 2025

Be prepared to see a lot of films in January, because for some reason every distributor in this country is crowbarring their most-anticipated titles into cinemas this month. In the January issue, you’ll find rapturous reviews for some of them, like Nosferatu (1 Jan), Nickel Boys (3 Jan), Babygirl (10 Jan) and The Brutalist (24 Jan), but this is only the tip of the iceberg. There's also the Andrew Garfield-Florence Pugh melodrama We Live In Time (1 Jan), the Jesse Eisenberg-Kieran Culkin road movie A Real Pain (8 Jan) and the eerie Danish true crime drama The Girl with the Needle (10 Jan). Add to this embarrassment of riches a trio of buzzy biopics (did I mention it’s Oscar season?), with Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown (17 Jan), Angelina Jolie as opera star Maria Callas in Maria (10 Jan) and various actors as John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner et al in Saturday Night (31 Jan). 

Oh, there’s an Oscar contender I missed: Hard Truths (out 31 Jan; reviewed in the January issue). It sees the mighty Mike Leigh reunite with his Secrets & Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste to tell the story of Pansy, an angry woman who can become apoplectic at the most minor of everyday inconveniences (as someone who travels regularly on ScotRail, I feel her pain). To mark Leigh’s return, GFT are presenting a four-film retrospective throughout January with Life is Sweet, Topsy-Turvy (screening from a 35mm print), Vera Drake and the aforementioned Secrets & Lies (see glasgowfilm.org for details). The season culminates with a preview of Hard Truths on 26 January.

Mike Leigh.

Celtic Connections features a cinematic event that looks unmissable: When Fish Begin To Crawl. Co-directed by Morag McKinnon and composer Jim Sutherland, the film celebrates the Flow Country, the vast region of bog peatland in the north of Scotland, which recently received UNESCO World Heritage status. The screening is presented as a triptych that will be projected across three massive screens in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall with the RSNO performing Sutherland’s score live; we're promised it'll take viewers on a mind-bending journey from the formation of galaxies to the emergence of life on Earth (2 Feb). (Also at Eden Court, Inverness, 28 Jan.)

How can we top that epic screening, a Mike Leigh season and all those Oscar contenders? A live appearance of The Skinny’s podcast The CineSkinny, that’s how! As part of GFT’s Queer Cinema Sundays, we’ll be presenting Xavier Dolan's Matthias & Maxime followed by an onstage discussion with the CineSkinny crew about the best queer cinema this side of the millennium (26 Jan).