Glasgow Film Festival highlights include Frightfest and Bowie tribute
The Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar! will open the festival with some big names, plenty of laughs and some old fashioned Hollywood glamour.
The comic extravaganza is set during the latter days of the studio system, with Josh Brolin as a “fixer” tasked with keeping its actors in line and George Clooney as megastar Baird Whitlock, who is kidnapped from the set of his latest film.
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Hide AdScarlett Johansson features as starlet DeeAnna Moran, Tilda Swinton plays twin gossip columnists and Channing Tatum is a Gene Kelly-esque song-and-dance man. Variety describes Hail, Caesar! as “a gorgeously crafted romp through vintage Hollywood”.
While, Clooney may not be making an appearance at the GFF, the festival will welcome to the red carpet Richard Gere, in Glasgow to promote this film and a role far removed from that of wealthy businessman Edward Lewis in Pretty Woman.
Here he plays a homeless man on the streets of New York who seeks to repair his relationship with his estranged daughter, in what has been described as an “astonishing, pared-back performance”. The film also stars Steve Buscemi and Kyra Sedgwick.
FrightFest will kick off with a special screening of The Forest starring Game Of Thrones actress Natalie Dormer and concluding with Sean Byrne’s The Devil’s Candy, this celebration of the horror and fantasy genre promises to give audiences “the frights of your lives”.
Co-director Alan Jones said: “FrightFest returns to Glasgow Film Festival with a programme that celebrates the ground-breaking, the innovative, the unique, the extreme but most essentially all that’s best and about the action horror fantasy genre.”
Glasgow’s planetarium will host a special 40th anniversary screening of The Man Who Fell To Earth and fans of the late singer will also be able to catch DA Pennebaker’s concert film of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars - regularly named as one of the best live music films ever made.
The festival will also screen the documentary short Let’s Dance: Bowie Down Under, which follows the Thin White Duke in the early 1980s.
Finally, a masked ball will be held in the city’s Trades Hall before a showing of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, while ticket holders for cult action classic Con Air will be handed regulation orange jumpsuits and transported on a ‘’prison bus’’ to the screening at a secret location.