BILLY THE KID   : [7/10] : US 07 : Jennifer Venditti : 85m : seen FH 15.8 (press)
Engaging fly-on-the-wall documentary is an intimate character-study of 15-year-old Billy Price, who lives with with his mother, stepfather and stepbrother in Lisbon Falls, Maine. Billy has an unspecified mental "condition" - something akin to Asperger's, perhaps - which can make him awkward in many social situations. But he's also precociously (over-)articulate, never short of an opinion or twenty, and very vocal about all of his many passions (heavy metal music, karate, and the neighbourhood girl he romances with a rather old-school courtliness.) Against initial expectations, Billy turns out to be stimulating company for the movie's running-time, though you do occasionally wonder how much of his offbeat persona is a matter of playing up for the ever-present, never-acknowledged camera. 

CONTROL   : [9/10] : UK (UK/US) 07 : Anton Corbijn : 122m : seen CW 15.8 (press)
   Superb Ian Curtis biopic is surely, barring some unforeseeable miracle, the British film of the year. We follow teenage Macclesfield poet Curtis (Sam Riley) from 1973 - on the momentous day he buys Bowie's Ziggy Stardust LP and meets his future wife Debbie (inexplicably top-billed Samantha Morton) - and on through the decade via the formation of doomy post-punk outfit Joy Division and the band's rapid success, until lead-singer Curtis's personal problems (romantic, physical, mental) become too much for him to handle.
   Control has two immediately obvious strong suits: shot in monochrome by cinematographer Martin Ruhe and director Corbijn (a remarkable first feature for this long-renowned photographer), it's consistently remarkable to look at, capturing in persuasive detail both the general atmosphere of northern Britain in the 1970s and also the particular aesthetic of Joy Division themselves. And the film is built around an absolutely phenomenal performance from Riley.
   Riley reportedly played Mark E Smith in a deleted scene - present on the extended DVD version* - of Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People (with which Control makes for a fascinating compare-and-contrast parallel), and this is effectively his big-screen debut. Though in the early stretches he resembles Pete Doherty as much as anyone else, as the film unfolds he simply becomes Ian Curtis before our eyes. 
   The on-stage sequences which punctuate the narrative are eerily, hair-raisingly accurate, but Riley's work is much, much more than simply a pitch-perfect impersonation. He shows the human face behind the iconic Curtis image (an image which Corbijn's photographs, ironically enough, helped to create) as a larkish, mop-haired schoolboy finds his voice and his metier, only to be rapidly overwhelmed by forces he can neither comprehend nor control - in the latter stages has the look of a haunted, harrowed, whipped greyhound. 
   While Curtis's behaviour (with regard to his domestic circumstances) isn't always admirable, he becomes a piercingly-vulnerable figure who arouses both sympathy and empathy - to the extent that on occasions it's frustrating that we can't reach into the screen and comfort him in moments of particular need (the film is largely based on Debbie's memoir, aptly entitled Touching From a Distance.)
   But while Curtis's story is an inescapably tragic one, Matt Greenhalgh's script ensures that proceedings aren't the doomy-and-gloomy affair one might expect from the subject-matter. The dialogue is consistently marbled with an audacious streak of Mancunian humour - often darkly sardonic, sometimes as disarmingly comic as anything in the Winterbottom movie - and it's the film's careful handling and modulation of tone that contributes to making the bleak climax so very difficult to take.

A MIGHTY HEART   : [7/10] : UK (UK/US) 07 : Michael Winterbottom : 108m : seen CW 16.8 (press)
The kidnap and murder of journalist Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman) is dramatised with the kind of near-documentary verisimilitude Winterbottom previously deployed on the likes of In This World. Focus is again on middle-eastern politics, with pretty much all the action taking place within Pakistan - specifically the teeming megalopolis of Karachi, where Pearl lived with his French wife Mariane (Angelina Jolie), and which is shown as a key site for radical Islamic activity. After the abduction (which takes place off-camera), the film divides its focus between the heavily-pregnant Mariane and the efforts by the Pakistani authorities to find out who has taken her husband, where they are and what they want. Winterbottom keeps the pace moving quickly along, chopping the action in short scenes that parcel out information in rapid bursts. Jolie doesn't dominate proceedings as much as you might expect (it becomes more of an ensemble piece as it goes along), but this is nevertheless very much a "proper" performance in a "proper" film. Tense and engrossing stuff, with a very powerful climax - a pity that the mildly-intrusive score is allowed to disrupt the convincing realism which Winterbottom and company have otherwise worked so hard to create and maintain.

IN THE WAKE OF A DEADAD   : [4/10] : UK 07 : Andrew Kötting : 62m : seen CW 16.8 (press)
Irritating piece of conceptual whimsy, which outstays its welcome even at a supposedly brisk running time. The director's father passed away in 2000; Kötting's way of dealing with this is to commission a 20-foot-high inflatable sporting a full-length photo of his deceased parent (referred to throughout as "the deadad", pronounced "dead-dad"). Kötting then takes the inflatable on a world tour of sites important either to his father, or to himself, or both - including stop-offs in the Faroe Islands, France, Mexico and Los Angeles. Nice work if you can get it - or rather, flim-flam funding bodies into handing over cash. Original in intention but a wayward misfire in execution, In the Wake of a Deadad is as cutesy and contrived as its off-putting title suggests - a self-indulgent and often narcissistic installation-art piece whose limitations are awkwardly exposed on the big screen. 

XXY   : [6/10] : Arg (Arg/Sp/Fr) 07 : Lucia Puenzo : 89m : seen CM 16.8 (press)
Teenage love and angst in a remote Uruguayan fishing village - the twist being that the romantic protagonists are a hermaphrodite (Ines Efron) and the son of the surgeon who may perhaps be engaged to operate on him/her. Low-key, slow-burning affair is shot in muted, greyey-bluey tones and proceeds as much by significant looks and silences as dialogue. The script isn't without pretentious undertones - the tormented hero/heroine's dad is an expert in marine biology whose surname just so happens to be Kraken, and there's all manner of symbolism involving turtles and other denizens of the deep. The he/she stuff, while undeniably unusual, is really just an attention-grabbing pretext to explore the relationships between parents and children, and on those terms XXY quietly succeeds.

DEATH PROOF   : [6/10] : US 07 : Quentin Tarantino : 113m : seen CW 16.8 (press)
Tongue-in-cheek homage to early-seventies exploitation cinema takes forever to get going - the action proper only really kicks in at the 90 minute mark - but then delivers a rather terrific car-chase climax that narrowly (but only narrowly) outweighs the longueurs of what's gone before. A psychotic stuntman (Kurt Russell) uses his super-modified stunt-car to cause all manner of murderous mayhem - but he eventually meets his match in the form of three women whose sassy attitude is exceeded only by their daredevil driving skills. The first hour or so features an unconscionable amount of padding: painfully over-extended conversations which come across like rather unfunny and indulgent self-parodies of Tarantino's signature scriptwriting style. The picture is also all over the place stylistically - the first half features all manner of rough-splicing, dialogue jumps and other "homages" to old-style cheapo moviemaking; the second half, erm, doesn't. Not by any means Tarantino's finest hour, then - especially if you're lucky enough to have caught John S Rad's genuinely delirious retread of similar terrain, Dangerous Men - though the ending is hilarious - and rather marvellous - in its jolting abruptness. 

THIS FILTHY WORLD   : [7/10] : aka John Waters - This Filthy World : US 06 : Jeff Garlin : 86m : seen CW 16.8 (public : paid £8.93)
Strictly speaking, This Filthy World shouldn't be in any film festival which - like Edinburgh - likes to pride itself on "innovative" and "cutting edge" fare. Strictly speaking, it shouldn't really be in any film festival at all, as it isn't really a film - just a bare-bones recording of a John Waters spoken-word event in Manhattan. And strictly speaking it's simply unacceptable that a "film" about a man whose own work has been so gloriously confrontational, envelope-pushing and iconoclastic should be itself so creatively conservative, so risk-less, so safe. It's just as well, then, that Waters saves the day - and then some - by delivering a monologue about his life and unique career that's so compulsively entertaining and so consistently hilarious. Waters fans will be in hog (-princess) heaven: Dreamland, to be exact; newcomers, meanwhile, will be trawling Amazon in search of Waters' back-catalogue at the earliest indecent opportunity.