Attentive festival-goers will have noticed that the Edinburgh International Film Festival, which normally joins the August fest line-up, is strangely absent.  Last year, EIFF announced they were moving to June from 2008, to position themselves better in the global film festival calendar.

That seems to have worked out well for them, but I still think it’s a loss for the sense of festival community in Edinburgh.  And they also contrived to open, run and conclude their entire festival in the two weeks I had booked for a summer holiday.  So, in the absence of a film festival, and armed with my trusty Cineworld pass (other cinema chains are available), I have been checking out some of the movies on general release this month!

Much has been made of the late Heath Ledger’s performance in Batman sequel The Dark Knight, including tips for a posthumous Oscar.  Ledger is fantastically chilling as The Joker, but if his parents do pick up a shiny gold statue it will be because the Academy is still feeling guilty for not giving him the award for Brokeback Mountain.  The film is excellent, better even than director Christopher Nolan’s first Bat-effort, Batman Begins, where he lumbered himself with an awkward origin story and Liam Neeson’s inexplicable goatee.  The action here is smart and unrelenting, but it’s two-and-a-half-hours well-spent.

Watching Mamma Mia leads me to one inescapable conclusion: surely the easiest way to make a million is to string together the book for a musical based on the repertoire of a familiar band from the seventies.  I mean, even Ben Elton can do it!  Mamma Mia isn’t bad at all, but it is very shrill and hen-partyish.  The combination of familiar songs and sub-standard singers lends it a kind of karaoke-style charm, which seems apposite for Edinburgh during the Fringe.

Finally, several sequences in Star Wars: The Clone Wars looked to me as if they could have been lifted straight from any of the live-action movies.  I don’t know what that says about the abundance of CGI in those films – they look a bit cartoonish? – but nevertheless, this animated Star Wars adventure is fun enough.  Set between Episodes II and III, the story centres on Anakin Skywalker (he who is to become Darth Vader) and his new Jedi apprentice, whose name I’ve already forgotten.  Adult Star Wars fans are reminded that they are getting a live-action series next year: this is very much for kids.  But it is a pleasing thought that Skywalker’s precocious padawan has to die sometime during the narrative arc of this cartoon.