xanna-439-529210 Brilliant and super charming! Some comedy and musical together...

Gareth Crook Mark Kermode doesn't always get it right. He heaped praise on this and quite frankly, it's awful. Now granted I'm not one for musicals, but I can be persuaded, you can't knock a bit of West Side Story and the Belle and Sebastian scored God Help The Girl a few years back was fantastic. It took me three sittings to grind through this schmalzy crap though. The songs are annoying, the characters are annoying, the story largely uneventful, to the point that take the songs out of this and there'd be little left. I hoped that this would redeem Edinburgh on the movie map after the disappointment of Trainspotting 2. It does not. Choose... something else.

david-meldrum Sometimes being predictable can be a good thing. My wife and I were in celebratory mood having received some long-awaited good news. We believe in marking the good things in life, so we decided on a movie (not exactly unusual for us, I guess) and a bite to eat after. So off we headed to Cape Town's finest cinema, one of the very few independents left in the country, for Sunshine On Leith; a British film finally on a limited South African release, several months after it arrived in British cinema. It's a musical. Based on a stage show; which in turn was based around the songbook of Scottish pop duo The Proclaimers. The musical is itself a family drama/love story set around the return of two soldiers from service in Afghanistan; it is, of course, set in a beautifully shot Edinburgh, as much attention given to obscure back-alleys as it is to sweeping skylines. The film's helped by some fine casting - Peter Mullan and Jane Horrocks adding heavyweight talent to proceedings as the parents; the rest of the cast can all sing more than well enough, and look as comfortable acting as they are singing. It helps, of course, that the songs are near perfect of their type, and with their folk inflected tone fit naturally into a storytelling structure. The context some songs end up with may be obvious a mile off, but no less the worse for it - what you're imagining right now about Letter From America, for instance, is almost certainly right on the money.Ultimately insubstantial as it is, the film is an addictive and life-affirming smile. I'm sure there are people who won't enjoy it, and this may be my celebratory mood talking, but I find it hard to imagine how you end up in such a place with this film. The cast and director give themselves so entirely to the project that you're swept-along on a tide of good feeling and well-wishing. It's a joy, from start to finish.

justincward Sunshine on Leith is a kind of 'Mamma Mia' for Scots twin brother folk/rock duo The Proclaimers - it strings a catalogue of their songs around a story of two soldiers returning from duty in Afghanistan. The opening, set in a personnel carrier where all the soldiers start to sing, is quite effective, except that it goes on far too long and the lead character is not established or marked out in any way.Once that's finally over, I think we get a kind of soap opera of two or more families and their Mike Leigh-style problems; I'm not sure because there is a long, repetitive song shoehorned into every scene, which goes on and on in that inexorable Proclaimers way that the twins Craig and Charlie manage to make work live, but when it's performed (or mimed to) by drama students (none of whom can sing and act at the same time) mugging their faces off, the song outstays its welcome over and over and over again.In every scene it's like some school production where the director said, 'well I know it's strictly not good drama, but you can all have a whacking great showstopper each, and we can all be great pals, OK?. Yes, even you, Peter Mullan, because no-one is to be left out'. The writer has just transferred River City to Andrew Lloyd Webber Hell. A TV soap script DOES NOT WQRK on the big screen, OK? After a while you start to imagine logos for advertisers drifting up on screen - SOL becomes like an endless series of outtakes from adverts for cider, as happy faces drift around glittering bars. The end may be good: it's isn't worth putting up with the first half for. You'll just want to change channel, like you do in the adverts.