Scottish Film Events: July 2025

Filmhouse returns after two long years, and it has plenty of talented filmmakers joining the cinema for Q&As in its first month. Matt Palmer presents a double bill of his two features, Calibre and Fear Street: Prom Queen (3 Jul); Athina Rachel Tsangari presents her poetic period film Harvest, which was shot in Oban (6 Jul); Amy Hardie screens her latest doc Love & Trouble (17 Jul); and the cult American director Whit Stillman will be in town for a screening of his wry 1990 comedy Metropolitan (25 Jul). A trio of mini-retrospectives also help Filmhouse kick off this new era; throughout July are seasons dedicated to Akira Kurosawa, Michael Haneke and Powell & Pressburger, with the latter two running into August. See filmhouse.org.uk for full details.

At DCA, there’s a rare opportunity to see Derek Jarman’s 1988 film The Garden (15 Jul), which he shot in and around his own garden in the shadow of the Dungeness nuclear power plant. A dreamy, kaleidoscopic work blending New Testament imagery with an excoriating vision of late-80s Britain at the height of the AIDS crisis, The Garden is a deeply moving film full of rage and beauty, and should look and sound incredible in this 35mm presentation. 

Talking of 35mm screenings, there's a couple coming up at Cameo not to be missed. First, Velvet Goldmine (12-16 Jul), Todd Haynes’ underrated glam-rock epic, which thankfully seems to be growing in reputation with each passing year. And then, Nicolas Winding Refn’s moody crime drama Drive (26 Jul-9 Aug). Analogue nuts should also make it to GFT for 35mm screenings of Ran (9-10 Jul), The White Ribbon (3 Jul) and Raising Arizona (28 Jul) – the latter is part of the cinema's ongoing Coen Brothers of the Month season.

Raising Arizona.

GFT also celebrates the release of David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds with a retrospective of six of the Canadian filmmaker's works: Videodrome, Scanners, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Crash and Eastern Promises (on 35mm), which run 5 to 30 Jul. And GFT’s essential Queer Cinema Sundays season continues to dig into lesser-seen corners of the queer canon with the 1996 erotic thriller Female Perversions starring Tilda Swinton (27 Jul). Elsewhere, GFT mark Glasgow Pride with Kenyan lesbian romance Rafiki (20 Jul) and 80s classic My Beautiful Laundrette (31 Jul) – the latter screens as part of the launch of Desi Queers, a new book on South Asian queer communities in Britain.

And on Glasgow's southside, alfresco cinema returns with the annual Queen's Park outdoor screenings (1-19 Jul). Once again, the lineup splits between family favourites (eg WALL-E, 10 Jul; The Wizard of Oz, 29 Jul), which screen early afternoon, then cult movies (eg Donnie Darko, 30 Jul; The Matrix, 10 Jul), horrors (eg Silence of the Lambs, 9 Jul; The Exorcist, 23 Jul) and comedies (eg Mean Girls, 15 Jul; The Grand Budapest Hotel, 17 Jul) in the evening. Tickets are sold on a sliding pay-what-you-can scale, starting at 50p.