Miracle at 88 Lothian Road!

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

We're continuing with our festive favourites in the run up to Christmas, with Frank Capra's tear-jerker classic It's a Wonderful Life, which reviews the life of small-town resident George Bailey, and a comedic take on the classic tale by Charles Dickens with The Muppets Christmas Carol. We're also screening Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 romantic comedy The Shop Around the Corner, in which two employees at a gift shop who can barely stand each other become anonymous pen pals without realising, and The Bishop's Wife, which features an angel in human form (Cary Grant) who enters the life of a bishop in order to help him build a new cathedral and repair his fractured marriage. To top it all off, we're bringing you Miracle on 34th Street, a true classic Christmas tale about believing in magic and the power of hope.

If cheery, heart-warming Christmas classics aren't really your thing, we've got Dark Xmas for you, a collection of unusual and exciting films from EIFF. The final film of this selection is Bob Clark’s influential spine-chiller Black Christmas, undoubtedly the most famous and effective of all festive horror movies. Although remade in 2006, nothing can hold a flickering candle to the terrifying original.

New Releases

New to our screens this week we have Song of Granite, a soulful biopic from acclaimed filmmaker Pat Collins about the life of Irish sean nós singer Joe Heaney. Also beginning on Friday is Jane, the story of legendary primatologist Jane Goodall, created from 140 hours of extraordinary unseen 16mm footage shot by Hugo van Lawick. Featuring new interviews with Goodall, this is an unprecedented portrait of a trailblazer who changed how we saw the natural world. Finally, we'll be showing Mountain, a visually stunning cinematic ode to mountain peaks narrated by Willem Dafoe and accompanied by the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Special Events

Don't miss David Lean’s spectacular and lushly romantic epic Doctor Zhivago, which is screening as part of The First World War in Cinema, a five year project programmed in association with the University of Edinburgh. And don't worry - there will be an interval in between! We're also treating you to Blade Runner: The Final Cut - Ridley Scott's definitive version of his sci-fi masterpiece, as well as the long-awaited sequel Blade Runner 2049. Also screening is a re-release of the classic Hitchcock adventure tale North By Northwest, starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason and featuring a thrilling score by Bernard Herrmann. 

10 from 17

We've been looking back on the last 12 months of cinema and bringing you handpicked selection of 2017's best films, chosen by Rod White, Head of Programming at Filmhouse. We're kicking things off with Luca Guadagnino's sun-dappled and sensual Call Me By Your Name, followed by Asghar Farhadi’s most recent film The Salesman, which follows the reasonably well-trodden path of the mildly nasty incident that takes on far greater significance via, in this case, the male half of a marriage’s response to it. To see what else we've chosen as our 2017 favourites, click here.