Inside Out
five stars
Dir: Pete Docter
Voices: Diane Lane, Amy Poehler
Runtime: 102 minutes
SINCE Brave and Monsters University opened here, Edinburgh has been the film festival home for Pixar's UK premieres, and they are back with a doozy this time. Endlessly inventive, funny, surreal, heartbreaking - Inside Out has everything you would expect from director Pete Docter (UP, Toy Story). Most of the action takes place inside the head of Riley, where Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger take turns at controlling her emotions. Thus far, Joy (voiced by a perfectly cast Amy Poehler in full Parks and Recreation, sunny side up mode) has ruled the roost, but now Riley has moved from Minnesota (home of the young Docter, strangely enough) to San Francisco, the new house is not very nice, dad is stressed, school sucks, and Sadness is in charge. Will Joy ever return? On the odd occasion I did wonder if some of the humour would take a rocket ride over the heads of young children, but there is enough here for all the family to enjoy. Animation loves ambition, and Docter has mountains of the stuff. Lucky Edinburgh once more.
On general release July 24
The Seven Five
four stars
Dir: Tiller Russell
With: Michael Dowd, Kenny Eurell
Runtime: 102 minutes
MIKE Dowd was a cop in the titular 75 - a police precinct in Brooklyn - in the Eighties. It was a time when crack cocaine was flooding American cities, the crime rate was soaring like the Manhattan skyscrapers, and law and order were on the brink of breaking down entirely in some parts of the city. Good cops were required, but as this electrifying documentary by Tiller Russell shows, Dowd was anything but a good cop, at least not in the way most understand the term. Dowd, according to one talking head interviewed here, was "a crook who ended up wearing a police uniform". Russell talks to the man himself, his former associates, and the internal affairs officers called in to clean up the borough. Riveting and revolting in equal measure, The Seven Five takes no prisoners. Surprise, surprise, Hollywood is to now to make a drama out of the tale.
Today [MON], 20.35 Cineworld
Love & Mercy
three stars
Dir: Bill Pohlad
With: Paul Dano, John Cusack
Runtime: 121 minutes
BRIAN Wilson receives the full biopic treatment with added bells, whistles, and pet sounds in Bill Pohlad's picture. With Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood) playing the Beach Boys founder in his youth, and John Cusack taking up the story in his later, lost years, Love & Mercy feels like two competing films. While his desire to do a complex story justice leaves Pohlad with a film that runs too long and wanders, the performances are superb, from Dano and Elizabeth Banks as Wilson's second wife especially. Stay right to the end for a very special rendition of the title track.
June 25, 18.00, Cineworld
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