The Week in Film 28 November – 4 December

A brief round-up of cinematic happenings around Scotland this coming week:

At Edinburgh Filmhouse there’s a tribute to Japanese director Jun Ichiwaka in a screening of Tony Takitani. The 2004 film is about an unemotional loner who works as a commercial artist because he prefers the literal to the fantastic or abstract, losing control of his emotions when he meets and marries Konuma, a demure woman with an obsessive shopping habit...the Winter Festival of Central and East European Film also continues.

Along at the Cameo there’s a double bill of troubled kid flicks Rebel Without a Cause and Badlands on Sunday...comedy Bigga than Ben gets a week-long release...Mexican film Ano Una also opens, a “beautiful meditation on the passage of time and the impermanence of things”.

Glasgow Film Theatre screens Waltz with Bashir, described by us as a film that “repeatedly challenges the way we interact with the fictional and the factual in our cinemas”…Conversations with my Gardener continues…Italy’s Quiet Chaos opens this week, the story of a man whose wife suddenly dies, leaving him to look after their 10-year-old daughter.

The Dundee Contemporary Arts theatre is showing new Julianne Moore film Blindness - when a man is inexplicably struck by a blindness which rapidly infects all who come into contact with him, the mysterious epidemic sweeps through the population, leaving its victims blinded...there’s also a chance to see The Banishment, Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s follow-up to his debut, The Return. This new film is about faith, desire, damaged masculinity and the tragedy of betrayal.

Clint Eastwood directs Angelina Jolie in The Changeling at Aberdeen’s Belmont Picturehouse. Set in 1928, the film tells of a woman who loses her son, only to have him return a different boy...quite literally.