Glasgow Film Festival

Glasgow Film Festival HQ

The film festival for audiences.
#GFF25
26 February - 9 March 2025

Stories

Our Story So Far: A History Of Violence (2005)

There’s a scene in A History of Violence where Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) comforts his daughter in the aftershocks of a nightmare, he tells her, “There’s no such thing as monsters”. It’s a tender yet quietly unsettling moment - whilst Tom may not be lying to her, we can’t help but sense he isn’t telling her the whole truth. It perfectly foreshadows a story which seems simple, but hides a much more complicated view of humanity.

Our Story So Far: Brick (2005)

Classic noir, which thrived in the 1940s and 1950s, was born from pulp crime novels and a generally-felt suspicion and dissatisfaction with how law and order was maintained. In American noir, we see a bleak, sensual and expressionist reflection of societal upheaval that was more interested in shades of grey than crisp black-and-white. Decades on, filmmakers who came of age during noir’s heyday began to update their favourite hardboiled stories – think the psychologically and visually ambitious worlds of Thief,…

Our Story So Far: Foxy Brown (1974)

Against red, blue, purple, a piercing neon green, she wears: a gold and black panelled top, ballooned sleeves and flowing trousers; a bikini; a red jumpsuit; a feathered top; and, a black leather trouser suit, punctuated with a kick and a gunshot. ‘She’s super bad,’ repeats the sweet, climbing tenor of Willie Hutch. The opening credits of Jack Hill’s Foxy Brown (1974) announces Foxy (Pam Grier) as a true force within the numerous, shifting spaces she occupies, while declaring her…

Our Story So Far: Young Frankenstein (1974)

In this era of modern filmmaking more films are becoming more profitable than original. Perhaps this is mainly due to the progressive technological growth that is continuing to shape and develop the films we see on our screens, but nevertheless originality is something we crave when going to the cinema. As part of Glasgow Film Festival’s 20th Anniversary edition retrospective season, Young Frankenstein is a film that was beyond its years. It’s humorous, unconventional, yet full of heart.

Our Story So Far: The Godfather Part II (1974)

Any cinephile worth their salt knows of Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece The Godfather (1972) and its sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974). Both are often heralded as the greatest films to be shown on the silver screen; both achieving Best Picture at their respective Academy Awards and the former earning the silver slot on the American Film Institute ranked list of greatest films. Beloved by so many, they were an easy target for Greta Gerwig’s billion-dollar box office behemoth Barbie…

Our Story So Far: Ninotchka (1939)

For almost a decade, Greta Garbo was the Queen of Hollywood. Poached from Sweden by Louis B. Mayer of MGM Studios and brought to America amid intense hype, she dominated silent cinema before successfully making the leap to talkies and becoming one of the biggest earners in the business. By 1939, however, her star-status was waning. Following a few flops, she was one of the many actors to be infamously deemed ‘box office poison’ by independent theatre owners. Legendary for…

Our Story So Far: Wuthering Heights (1939)

Hollywood has always loved a star-studded literary adaptation. William Wyler’s ultra-romantic 1939 reworking of Emily Brontë’s terrifyingly powerful novel still sweeps audiences away 85 years later, remaining faithful in spirit yet smartly adapting to on-screen storytelling. 

Recent reviews

European Premiere at GFF23 TODAY

Jonas Chernick (Ashgrove, James vs. His Future Self) returns to GFF starring alongside the wonderful Emily Hampshire (Schitts Creek) in Sean Garrity’s latest comedy about a married couple desperate to reignite the spark in their now routine marriage.

When Josh and Emma send their kids off to camp for the week, they are quickly faced with the realisation that their sex life has grown stale. In a bid to reinvigorate their relationship, the pair embark…

UK Premiere

Following the capers and misfortunes of Icelandic female punk collective The Post Performance Blues Band, blends fact and fiction to delightful ends.

'Bandmates Álfrún, Saga and Hrefna give themselves one year to make it big or leave the business for good, with the film documenting their make-it-or-break-it pursuit for unattainable fame. Spinal Tap meets Flight of the Conchords meets Bjork in Örnólfsdóttir’s sometimes deep but always hilarious docu-allegory'

See the film then see the band! At #GFF23 The…

Lee Grant's documentaries are rich portraits on trailblazing subjects - taking a direct and empathetic eye to the systematic and cultural horrors being perpetuated in contemporary America.

The year in which the film was made, 1,500 women were being killed each year in America by a husband or a boyfriend. BATTERED offers an unflinching portrait of this epidemic of domestic violence.

Grant's documentaries bring a voice to the voiceless and you can see them soon at GFF23 as part of our retrospective honouring her work.

Tickets here

Liked reviews

I guess it makes sense: in the same year we get Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon, two historical epics that break conventions of the genre and try and do something interesting with it, there has to be the reply, the formulaic, shallow, episodic, expensive bloater that reassures Hollywood, "it's okay, people will still come and see the usual empty spectacle, we don't need to start actually working on our scripts". Paging Ridley Scott!

They missed a bit off the title - it should have been called Napoleon: Old Hat.

Zodiac

Zodiac

★★★★★

david fincher should make a film about me going on a 2+ hour wikipedia deep dive at 3am

This auspicious and enigmatic second feature from French filmmaker Léa Mysius unfurls like an ethereal remix of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in its fantasy-flecked exploration of a pre-teen girl attempting to comprehend the romantic affiliations of her parents. It’s perhaps not as cut-and-dried as that description makes it sound, and there are fewer explosions of violence. Passion, yes; violence, no.

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In its own dryly ironic way, the title of French writer/director Rebecca Zlotowski’s fifth feature has the power to strike fear into the heart. It suggests a horror movie: the horror of having to pretend to be the mother of a child who is not yours; the horror of biological changes to the body and the loss choice those changes bring; the horror of living in the shadow of another woman; the horror of realising that time is slipping away from you, and you cannot stop the clock.

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