Kill Your Friends (CTBC) Three stars
With: Nicholas Hoult, Craig Roberts Dir: Owen Harris
Runtime: 100 minutes
LOTS of boys behaving very badly feature in Owen Harris’s slick adaptation of the titular novel by John Niven. Ayrshire lad Irvine was once an A&R man in London, and he chose the world as the setting for his tale of a flash young geezer by the name of Stelfox (Nicholas Hoult) who believes not just in career advancement but in grinding his enemies’ noses into the dirt as he goes. Harris’s film boasts a cameo by James Corden as a fellow A&R man, and the story rattles along, but Hoult, outstanding as he is, is not a patch on American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman as a twisted anti-hero, and the film suffers from the near fatal flaw that there is not one character who is likeable. Here is a treat though: tomorrow night, Niven comes home to talk about the film with fellow crime author Ian Rankin at the GFT.
Glasgow Film Theatre, October 30, 20.00, plus Q&A. On general release, November 6
The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (15)
four stars
Dir: Stanley Nelson
Runtime: 115 minutes
SHADES, berets, leather jackets, guns … the image of the Black Panthers is perhaps better known than the facts of the movement, making Stanley Nelson’s documentary a must-see for anyone interested in the era, or in how a revolutionary movement forms, thrives, then implodes. As one of the former Panthers interviewed here puts it: “We were making history, and it wasn’t nice and clean. It wasn’t easy. It was complex.” Nelson starts the story in 1966 in Oakland, California, where the Panthers armed themselves in self-defence against police brutality. What happened next, from FBI targeting to lack of clear leadership, is laid out in gripping detail with the help of rich archive material, many a historian and, most tellingly, the women who were the unheralded backbone of the movement.
Glasgow Film Theatre, November 1-4
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