It’s actually quite a strange experience watching The September Issue, RJ Cutler’s documentary about Vogue. For one, there’s something fascinating about watching the mechanics of another magazine in operation. It would, of course, be self-indulgent of me to base an entire blog on magazine publishing – or, indeed, looking for parallels between the staff of Vogue and Uncut. But I suppose, to some degree, it’s inevitable. Still, I’ll try not to bore you too much with talk of RF1s or ed:ad ratios and concentrate, instead, on the personalities that make The September Issue absolutely fascinating viewing. Principally, this is Anna Wintour, Vogue’s British-born Editor-in-Chief, a woman who’s already been sort of immortalised in screen in The Devil Wears Prada, where Meryl Streep played a character not a million miles from Wintour. Wintour comes with plenty of baggage: the daughter of an Evening Standard editor, she was in the heart of Soho in the Sixties (she dated Oz founder Richard Neville for a while), and has built a formidable magazine resume over the years culminating with the Vogue post, which she’s held since 1988. Wintour’s rise has not been without controversy. She has been characterised as a cold and aloof figure, and her pro-fur stance hasn’t exactly endeared her towards activists. She was nicknamed “Nuclear” after culling most of the staff when she took over. On the up, perhaps, she was ahead of the curve in terms of predicting the rise of celebrity culture, and under her aegis Vogue has re-established itself as an iconic global brand, selling around 1.3 million copies a month. Wintour’s foil in The September Issue (the film, incidentally, is named after the key edition of the magazine that covers off the Autumn fashion season) is Grace Coddington. Another ex-pat, Coddington is Vogue’s Creative Designer, joining the magazine at almost the same time as Wintour. If, to some degree, Wintour is Vogue’s head then Coddington is its heart. She is passionate about fashion but arguably lacks Wintour’s pragmatic approach to magazine craft. The two, it seems, regularly lock horns, and it’s their conflicts that provide much of the colour in Cutler’s film. Of course, it’s debatable whether Wintour really is such a devil. Watching her here, you sense she has a forensic knowledge of how her magazine works. Her attitude towards junking entire shoots Coddington has worked on are based not on any enmity (she’s generous and forthcoming in her praise of Coddington) but instead are led by entirely pragmatic reasons. Maybe they disrupt the flow of the issue, or she doesn’t like the colour blocking. It’s just business, nothing personal. Of course, this being about fashion, there are some priceless moments, of which the declaration in one editorial meeting that “Jacket is the new coat” is a highlight. Hilarious, and you’ll hopefully be pleased to know not the kind of discussions we have during our own editorial meetings. Anyway, that’s me done for Edinburgh this year, though the Festival runs until Sunday. Hope you’ve enjoyed the blogs. Cheers.

I have to admit, rather pathetically, that my cumulative knowledge of claymation is limited to the exploits of Morph on Tony Hart’s TV shows and, of course, Wallace And Gromit. Profoundly ill-equipped as I am, I nonetheless caught up with Mary And Max this afternoon. I will report now that this is some clear distance away from the cosy world of Aardman. Oh, yep. [youtube]MgRjB8PEDkM[/youtube] Narrated by Barry Humphries, Mary And Max is a idiosyncratic story about the 20-year, long distance pen-friendship between the two protagonists. Mary Daisy Dinkle is an 8 year-old girl living in Australia. Her favourite colour is brown and she has a pet rooster. She has a birth mark on her forehead “the colour of poo” that she detests. Her mother chain-smokes and drinks sherry – “tea for grown-ups” which needs to be constantly drunk “to check the temperature”. Mary learns from her grandfather that babies are found by daddies at the bottom of their beer glasses. With typical child-like curiosity, she decides to find out where babies come from in America and pulls out Max’s details at random from the New York phone book. Max Horowitz, an obese 44 year-old Asperger’s sufferer, lives in Manhattan with a collection of animals, including a succession of goldfish, all called Henry (at the start of the film, we find him consigning the recently departed Henry VIII to a watery grave down the toilet). He is, you might quickly ascertain, an unlikely friend for Mary. But they’re both fans of chocolate and, crucially, an animated TV show called The Noblets. It strikes me, reading this back, that there’s something saccharine sounding about the story, written and directed by Oscar-winning Australian animator Adam Elliot. In fact, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Elliot shapes a strong narrative about these two seemingly incompatible friends that visits some very dark places – particularly Max’s horrific anxiety attacks and the other distressing aspects of his Syndrome. It is a film about profoundly lonely and isolated people, and the astonishing connection they make. As the grown-up Mary, Toni Collette finds much sweetness in her character, but it’s Philip Seymour Hoffman as Max who dominates the film. He brings a vivid sense of despair to the character. Visually, the film is fantastic, as you might expect. Mary’s scenes in Australia are shot in a brown/rusty palette, the New York segments in cold, grim grey. Both characters are weird and freakish to look at, which to some degree I suppose is deliberately designed to emphasise their otherness, their outsider status. Elliot does a good job of articulating the tenderness of their growing relationship through their letters, and how, in turn, they grow as people through the correspondence. It is, I guess, a more mature experience than we might be used to with Wallace And Gromit (or even Tim Burton’s animation work). Big points, too, for using the Penguin Cafe Orchestra on the soundtrack. Right, off -- finally! -- to see The September Issue. I'll blog about that in the morning, sitting on a train back to London...

As films go, it’s hard to ignore a movie where the top-line talent is Christopher Walken, William H Macy and Morgan Freeman – three actors, it hardly needs saying, who are pretty much UNCUT incarnate. It’s a shame, though, that this fortuitous convergence of talent isn’t given a better vehicle. That’s not say The Maiden Heist is a bad film – it certainly isn’t – but it perhaps lacks the oomph you’d think they’d merit. Directed by Brit Peter Hewitt – he who made Sliding Doors – it’s an amiable, if lightweight caper movie, where the three leads play veteran museum security guards who decide to rob their favourite exhibits when a new curator plans to change the collection. The pleasure, inevitably, is watching the three of them play off each other. Walken is quietly intense, Freeman laid back and amiable, Macy borderline neurotic. To some degree, they’re all playing to type: in the opening sequence, Walken’s Roger drifts in a fantasy whereby the museum is invaded by armed robbers, whom he dispatches with both guns blazing – exactly as you’d imagine Walken would do in pretty much any film he’s appeared in with a vowel in the title. There’s plenty of fun watching them bicker and fanny around conducting midnight dry runs of the heist dressed in balaclavas. There’s great support, too, from Marcia Gay Harden as Roger’s awful, crass (but kind-hearted) wife. It’s all very sweet, good-natured fare. But, like I said, you can’t really stop wishing these three dudes had been working with meatier, more substantial material.

It says much, perhaps, about the enduring appeal of James M Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice that it’s been adapted three times already for cinema and, astonishingly, even once as an opera. This year, you can add two more adaptations - Vasilis Douvlis' The Homecoming and Jerichow, from writer-director Christian Petzold. [youtube]mRO_3aCVuMs[/youtube] Jerichow is a small town to the west of Berlin. As the film opens, ex-soldier Thomas (Benno Fuermann) has returned home for his mother’s funeral. He’s met, grave-side, by two men to whom he owes money. There is a sudden, shocking moment of violence and Thomas is left for dead. In a way, these opening 10 minutes set the tone. Full of stately Stedicam shots and passages of brooding silence, they build an atmosphere of unease that runs through the film like slow-acting poison. Thomas, serendipitously, meets Ali (Hilmi Sozer), the owner of a chain of local stores, and after Ali loses his license he offers Thomas a job as his driver. Ali has a wife, the graceful but distant Laura (Nina Hoss). She and Thomas – as fans of Cain’s novel will know – soon start an affair. Things do not end well. Although one of the key filmmakers in the New German Cinema, Petzold’s previous films – Yella and The State I Am In – both doffed their cap to American movies. Yella borrowed from Herk Harvey’s 1962 b-horror movie, Carnival Of Souls, while The State I Am In in many ways played out as a homage to Sidney Lumet’s Running On Empty. But while in those movies Petzold filtered his influences via observations on present-day Germany, this riff on Cain’s novel seems to have no such subtext. He seems happy here to let it play as a tightly constructed psychological thriller. There’s much to admire here – not least the performances from Fuermann and Hoss. Their blankness and inscrutability make it hard to determine quite what they’re thinking, which adds conspicuously to the tension. By the end, you're forced to wonder quite how complicit Ali, even, was in the unfolding of events, or whether Laura had perhaps more ambivalent feelings towards Thomas than you might have imagined.

I first met film maker Andrea Arnold at the Sundance festival in 2003, when she was premiering her short film, Wasp. An eventual Oscar winner, Wasp was a bleak but compelling slice of socio-realist cinema about a single mother trying to raise her kids on a claustrophobic London council estate. Arnold revisits, to some degree, the themes of Wasp for Fish Tank, her second full-length feature. Already highly praised in Cannes – it was one of only three British films in competition – it’s certainly the best film I’ve seen since arriving in Edinburgh. A lot of this is down to Katie Jarvis, Arnold’s 17 year-old novice lead who the director spotted, on a train station, rowing with her boyfriend. As Mia, the main character in Fish Tank, she’s in every scene; it’s a phenomenal undertaking for a debuting actress. 15 year-old Mia lives with her mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and younger sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths) in an Essex council estate. Mia has been expelled from school, and she spends most of her time rowing with other girls on the estate or sinking bottles of cheap supermarket booze. Joanne, you suspect, has rarely shown her children much in the way of affection, and Mia and Tyler mask any disappointment or hurt at such neglect with bloody-minded scorn and almost perpetual anger, lashing out at anyone and anything given half a chance. Mia, though, does harbour dreams of being a dancer; she breaks into a disused flat on the estate and, with music playing on her tiny portable iPod speakers, practises her moves. Things change when Joanne takes up with the charming, handsome Conor (Michael Fassbinder), who acts like a real father to the girls – even taking the family on trips into the Essex countryside. He is supportive, too, of Mia, as she confides in him that she has an audition as a dancer in a local nightclub. Mia, unused to receiving anything remotely resembling encouragement, is uncertain how to respond, alternating between suspicion and gratitude. It’s not giving much away to reveal that there is something looming with Conor and events take a particularly unpleasant turn. Jarvis and Fassbinder are superb -- their performances fizz with energy and chemistry. Arnold, meanwhile, finds incredible flashes of beauty in the urban sprawl, whether it be a skyline or, in a scene that touches on magic realism, the sudden appearance of a horse. I'll revisit Fish Tank in more depth when I review for its theatrical release in September. And you can see some clips here.