Son of a Gun (15)
four stars
Dir: Julius Avery
With: Brenton Thwaites, Ewan McGregor
Runtime: 109 minutes
CONTINUING the run of Aussie crime drama success started by Animal Kingdom is this little belter of a tale. JR (Brenton Thwaites) is a kid in trouble. So much trouble he is locked up in a prison where the inmates are tougher than the bars that hold them. When he is taken under the titanium wing of hardman Brendan (Ewan McGregor), it looks like JR might have found the father figure he longs for. Director Julius Avery, working with not much cash but a lot of talent, mines the Thwaites-McGregor relationship and finds gold, and the action and twists keep on coming right to the exhilarating end.
Trash (15)
three stars
Dir: Stephen Daldry
With: Martin Sheen, Rickson Tevez
Runtime: 114 minutes
GARDO, Raphael and Rato are three young amigos who earn a living picking through the trash mountains of Brazil. When one day they find a wallet containing money it looks like a simple case of hitting paydirt, until they decide to investigate further. Stephen Daldry adapts Andy Mulligan's bestseller, adding in such big names as Martin Sheen as a priest and Rooney Mara as a volunteer teacher to sell the picture. While the kids are uniformly excellent, the mixture of worthiness, intrigue, music and developing world lecture doesn't entirely come off.
La Maison de la Radio (PG)
four stars
Dir: Nicolas Philbert
Runtime: 104 minutes
ETRE et Avoir director Nicolas Philbert returns with an exquisitely assembled sound and vision documentary about the wireless. Radio France, like a certain publicly-funded station closer to home (well, based in London), has high profile breakfast and afternoon news programmes, plays, a shipping forecast (featuring the North Sea, naturally), big name guests from the arts, live music - everything bar The Archers, basically, but delivered in an oh-so-French way. Philbert's cool, amused eye observes a day in the life of the station, from gallows humour in the newsroom to the eerie calm of the graveyard shift. A must see for radio fans, as well as anyone hoping to make a career in the medium.
Glasgow Film Theatre, January 30-February 1
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