The Disappearance of Flight 412

Glenn Ford and David Soul

“This is a UFO,” says a disembodied voice at the beginning of The Disappearance of Flight 412. “It was photographed at Santa Catalina Island in April 1966.” A blurry colour image appears on the screen and an arrow points at something in the middle. It could be a flying saucer (as no one seems to call them any more). The Disappearance of Flight 412 then cuts to archive footage of various interviewees saying they saw something similar. As well as the talking heads there’s a montage of photographs, all blurry, none conclusive, of objects that might be a full-sized alien spacecraft or a dinner plate thrown frisbee-like into the sky. The blurriness adds … Read more

Filth

James McAvoy as the deranged cop Bruce Robertson in Filth

The last film I saw that had any Irvine Welsh involvement was The Magnificent 11, a comedy so peculiarly inept that I started to think it was deliberate, a tax write-off perhaps, or a spoof of depressing British comedies of the early 1970s, in which girls with blue eye-liner would shed an ill-fitting bra to reveal dog-eared breasts. Jon S Baird’s adaptation of Welsh’s 1998 novel is far more what we expect from the writer of Trainspotting. Welsh has been out of fashion just long enough to be due a comeback, but is this what our New Puritan age is clamouring for – the sweary, druggy, skanky story of a very naughty Edinburgh copper? … Read more