Stellar highlights there were, but too few to make 2010's Edinburgh International Film Festival one of the best

Published on Thursday 24 June 2010 20:53

THE 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival draws to a close this weekend and, on reflection, it has been an oddly morbid affair. Maybe that's just the state of world cinema at this point in time, but so much of the programme seems to have been unduly focused on death it would probably be easier to tally up the films that didn't feature in their plots some combination of funerals (Get Low, The Last Rites of Lonesome Pride, The Extra Man), terminal illness (Donkeys, The Goo

• A scene from Winter's Bone

Third Star, the debut film from British director Hattie Dalton, revolves around a terminally ill 29-year-old making a final trip to his favourite coastal spot with his three best friends. The film is notable mostly for the showcase it provides two rising British actors: Benedict Cumberbatch, as the eccentric, angry-about-dying narrator, and JJ Feild, as his cynical best friend. Their relationship does much to undercut the mawkishness of the subject matter, but not quite enough to lift the film entirely out of the realms of sentimentality. In the end, despite a strong visual style, the film overdoses on the kind of live-for-the-moment platitudes which only ever seem to be expressed in films that, ironically, never feel like essential viewing.

The morbid vibe was actually kicked off by the opening night gala premiere of Sylvian Chomet's beautiful looking but thematically miserable The Illusionist, though the film's gorgeous evocation of Edinburgh made it an obvious choice to open the festival and a perfect showcase for its beautifully converted new cinematic space at the Festival Theatre. Sean Connery also paid loving and amusing tribute to the new venue at the special screening of The Man Who Would Be King last weekend – an event designed both to celebrate his imminent 80th birthday and his contribution as the festival's long-standing patron.

Of the actual films in the programme, this year's EIFF justified its heavily promoted "discovery" tag with the European premieres of a couple of genuinely exceptional films. The first was Winter's Bone, Debra Granik's terse, hard-scrabble neo-detective film about a young girl's search for her jailbird father in the closed-off environs of Missouri's Ozark mountains. With a stunning lead performance from actress Jennifer Lawrence and haunting cinematography from Scottish-born director of photography Michael McDonough, it seemed to get under the skin of everybody I've talked to about it, and is easily the film of the festival.

The other discovery was Monsters, a brilliantly inventive sci-fi movie set in Central America in the aftermath of an alien invasion. What sounded initially like a B-movie parody turned out to be a gorgeously shot relationship drama, a politically resonant sci-fi thriller and a wondrous effects movie rolled into one, the sort of film that could give JJ Abrams a run for his money and is certainly of a piece with the likes of District 9.

Its multi-tasking British director Gareth Edwards shot the film with minimal crew on location in Central America and the US in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, making use of whatever natural sets he could find and getting his actors, Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able, to improvise their dialogue. All the monster effects, meanwhile (which Edwards also did), were added in post-production.

It's a great example of run-and-gun guerrilla filmmaking on a blockbuster scale, the kind of movie that advocates of digital technology have been promising for the best part of a decade, but until now have failed to deliver. Accordingly it's the film that has generated the most buzz during the past ten days.

Other highlights have included Toy Story 3, which was predictably brilliant, and the festival's documentary strand. Restrepo, a clear-headed and gripping account of a platoon of US soldiers deployed to Afghanistan's deadly Korengal Valley, was the highlight, but Etre et Avoir director Nicolas Philibert's orang-utan movie Nnette was lovely and poignant and Blank City served up an excellent history of the post-punk underground New York filmmaking scene from which Jim Jarmusch, Vincent Gallo and Steve Buscemi all emerged.

Elsewhere, though, it has been a fairly underwhelming year. Yes, there were laughs to be had in the heartfelt New Zealand coming-of-age comedy Boy and the amusing US indie comedy Barry Munday. But minor gems such as these were few and far between.

Of the British contingent (aside from Monsters) nothing really stood out. Cherry Tree Lane, the latest from London to Brighton director Paul Andrew Williams, was provocative and very well made, but was also a bit of a retread of Michael Haneke's Funny Games, and Mr Nice suffered from a surprisingly dull subject (Welsh drug runner Howard Marks).

Though shot and funded in the US, Scottish filmmaker Diane Bell's debut Obselidia, about a collector of obsolete objects, had plenty of nice ideas, but its prosaic script never convinced and, like The Illusionist, it was shot through with an infantile nostalgia for things that weren't that great to start with. I didn't get much out of the Edinburgh-set occult chiller Outcast either, though it seemed to go down well with the late night Cameo audience and at least looked like a proper movie – never a given for a Scottish production.

Outcast's stars Kate Dickie and James Cosmo also turned up in Donkeys, Morag McKinnon's disappointing follow-up to Andrea Arnold's Red Road. Though it featured many of the same actors as that film, their characters had entirely different histories and the central story thread about a terminally ill father (Cosmo) trying to make amends with his estranged daughter (Dickie) was tonally all over the place.

Still, at least it wasn't among the worst films of the festival, though, depressingly, British films did take those honours. Nick Moran's misery memoir adaptation The Kid was a wretched, grotesque piece of poverty porn made with a misguided faith in the power of montage to tell a compelling story. Pelican Blood was a try-hard attempt to transform the obsessive world of bird-watching into something cool and edgy. Puppet animation movie Jackboots on Whitehall was a mirthless, misconceived effort that tried to apply the gross-out humour of Team America to an alternate history of the Second World War in which Hitler's successful invasion of Britain forces Winston Churchill to take refuge in the barbaric environs of Scot Land. Its satirical highpoint was an embarrassingly weak joke involving an Australian William Wallace.

And on the subject of embarrassingly weak jokes, there was Huge, Brit comedian Ben Miller's joke-free comedy about comedy, the world premiere of which was greeted with the occasional polite titter, but mostly the deafening silence of a room full of paying punters and festival delegates not laughing. Filled with cameos from the British comedy scene (Eddie Izzard, David Baddiel, Jack Dee, Frank Skinner), its story about a Morecambe and Wise-loving double act didn't for a second feel authentic.

So, not a banner year, then, but the great films have been genuinely great – shame there weren't more of them.

&#149 The Edinburgh International Film Festival closes tomorrow night with Third Star, screening at Cineworld at 9:30pm. www.edfilmfest.org.uk