The 68th Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Abstract

Despite celebrating its 63rd birthday with a stupendously underwhelming Opening Night film (Sam Mendes' Away We Go ), the Edinburgh International Film Festival isn't ready for retirement yet. Allegedly a comedy, Away We Go is yet another shoe-gazing mope through the lives of a couple of middle-class, thirty-something slackers and the existential crisis they face as they try to get to grips with adulthood and figure out the best place to settle down and spawn. Directed on autopilot by Sam Mendes, Away We Go is the type of laid-back, unfunny, comedy mumbleathon normally made by earnest young indie directors and starring earnest, young indie actors with names like Zooey. Full of the kind of loveably eccentric kooks you'd cheerfully garrotte if they existed anywhere outside of smug, self-satisfied films like this, Away We Go is like being stuck at a dinner party full of Guardian columnists. And not the fun ones like Charlie Brooker. No, we're talking about the whiny, spoilt ones like Lucy Mangan. Hopefully at some point in the future, some genius will decide to programme Away We Go as one half of a double bill with Sam's recent laugh-fest Revolutionary Road . Far funnier was Justin Molotnikov's dark, little Scottish film Crying With Laughter . Equal parts black comedy and Cape Fear -style revenge thriller, Crying With Laughter charts the worst week in Edinburgh stand-up comic Joey Frisk's (Stephen McCole) life as a chance meeting with old school friend Frank (Malcolm Shields) leads to him being made homeless, framed for attempted murder, and involved in a kidnapping as old scores are settled and the guilty are punished. Scots actor Stephen McCole is fantastic as the put-upon comic and his performance is hilariously un-PC and subtly vulnerable with Shields a sympathetic, if relentless, villain and the final revelation, while …