Iona studied at Cambridge University and Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design. Since graduating she has worked in TV as an associate producer and director on programmes for Granada, RDF Media, Brook Lapping, Endemol and the BBC – including work on two BAFTA award-winning series. In 2007 Iona founded Misfit Films, a company that develops and produces short films and promotional videos. Iona likes making, watching and writing about movies – she is not a well-rounded person and needs to develop other interests.

Brimful with regret

These are both one-man shows about personal histories. And both make use of the same device - at the end they break down the drama they’ve established in favour of something more ‘real’.

A deconstructive epic

Weirdly, this play is somewhat like a feminist Fight Club, without the blood and fists, but with a lot of the same quixotic elation.

Mothers and lunatics

Both Motherland and The Idiot Colony are woven from the stories of hidden women. Both plays at their close leave these women as respondents and victims, placing them back behind a net curtain or a veil of hair.

Misfit birds and bees

Chloe and Jacob are teenagers lost in a world that doesn’t value them, searching for ways out. And their experiences pose questions - do we only exist if other people are watching us?

Vivid life amid darkness

All three plays deal with violent deaths and share a penchant for the kind of dim, sinister mood lighting usually seen in a psychopath’s basement. Terminus, Fall and Pornography - the titles alone are gloomy. 

Neon and joyous and riotous

This show is so full of life and exuberance that the audience have to be shielded with plastic to protect them from the life and exuberance.

Puppets trapped in a Godless world

In their form, and some of their content, Shitty Deal Puppet Theatre’s two shows aren’t original, but they are fun.

One tenement block and two broken families

The Biggars and the Dreichs are living puppets - strange dwarfish caricatures of people – like figures seen in a circus mirror. The actors’ heads perch above truncated fabric bodies, hung like bibs around their necks.

Blood, guts and not much brain

The film made me glad to be a vegetarian. Tim Burton’s latest piece of Victorian Gothic is a celluloid chamber of horrors, stuffed with meat pies beyond even Jamie Oliver’s wildest nightmares.

A slow dance towards death

After the tragic fall there’s a distinct epilogue that extracts and examines the running themes of fame and myth-making. Ford had idolised the Jesse James of dime novels and ‘bandit weeklies’; he identified with a man he didn’t know but whose fame created a false familiarity.

The cure for cancer

Between Will Smith’s performance, Lawrence’s direction and production designer Naomi Shohan’s vision, the first half of this film has the confidence to be detailed yet grand, emotional but not sentimental and slow though tense – very, very tense – despite the fact it’s essentially the narrative of one man and his dog.

What ever happened to the liberal dream?

This isn’t the film to rage at the dying of the light or to offer simple moral paradigms. Dunne may be a teacher, he may even be inspirational, but he’s also a soiled anti-hero, part Coupland part Dostoyevsky – sleazy, violent and alone. Dunne is in a hinterland, submerged in a haze of drugs and failed hope - caught in a headlock.

A lens smeared with Vaseline

The problem is that none of the leads are interesting – they are devoid not only of psychological depth, but also of any broader social resonance. They exist in a vacuum, offering no wider comment on humanity, as if the world is merely a bland reflection of their own ill-drawn strife.

Hollywood buddies

The plan is both a metaphoric and a very literal shake down of The Bank - Willie’s neatly, if egotistically, named gambling skyscraper – involving a giant drill and a fake earthquake. Yep, a giant drill and a fake earthquake - you can practically feel Dr No and Dr Evil seething with jealousy.

Dumont’s slaughter of the innocents

For Dumont the film belongs firmly to him, not the performers – he is the auteur. He has a purposefully difficult relationship with his actors – ‘I’m not looking to make friends’. And he expressly states he does not have affairs with actresses.

Colonial watercolours

Kitty could so easily come across merely as the spoilt child of Empire, annoying and vacuous, but Naomi Watts and her director John Curran bring out far more complexity in her. And importantly the story doesn’t judge her for not being as serious as her husband.

Keep the door shut

Like its predecessor, this film has more to do with humanity than Hades. There’s a distinct sense of a post-God world in both films. The Rage Virus has been created in a laboratory – so what we have to fear is man-made, not supernatural. But Weeks is bleaker than Days.

Some messed-up sex object

This is a bizarre film. It’s quite hard to work out what its point is. Hazarding a guess it seems to be that Southern girls who are sexually abused turn into nymphomaniacs who are cured by chastity belts. It’s ambiguous as to whether this is a) comic b) badly conceived c) misogynistic.

We’re all part of the Machine

Despite the film’s didacticism, it isn’t a left-wing polemic. It’s a riff on the book - not a celluloid equivalent of it. It’s not an expose, jumping up and down and shouting. In fact it’s a film whose argument has more in common with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis than with the work of Michael Moore.

Going Under

One by one the elements that make up Aidan are being shut down - so he decides to shut himself down. What he opts for is nothing as grand and Continental as a suicide. No - Aidan decides to bury himself alive in his own garden. The British are, after all, a nation of gardeners.

What I Heard About Iraq

For a play that trades heavily on righteous veracity, you can’t help feeling it’s actually a simplistic and worn-out polemic that is preaching to the converted. We’ve heard it all before.

Hamburg

Hamburg is both a neat half-hour history lesson and a warning from history. It creates a vortex of horror, aided by remarkable and shocking sound design, but it offers little beyond the fire of the moment.

Finer Noble Gases

You wait for something more, but it’s just not there. the American Dream is as hollow and wasted as the lives laid out before us on stage. Well shucks, we’ve never been told that before.

Redreamt

Imagine what would happen if your subconscious was given its own Edinburgh venue. And was allowed to throw cornflakes at people. Here humour and violence, chaos and order tumble over each other like scary clowns, each threatening to strangle the last.

The Convent

More gothic and twisted than a night out in Camden, this is a grim tale of self-interest, malice, false belief and murder. But it’s also very funny.