The fun continued in Edinburgh as the Edinburgh International Film Festival entered its third day in the Scottish town. Amongst the films on offer were The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq war story with Jeremy Renner, and Wasted, a homegrown Scottish film that's attracting much buzz. But perhaps the most exciting film screening yesterday had to wait for the Night Moves slot, at 10PM, to get its world premiere.

Stuart Hazeldine's Exam is the real job interview from hell -- a group of highly driven career types enter a small room with nothing but a guard at the door and a clock counting down 80 minutes. There's a question they need to answer, but their exam sheets are totally blank. As they work together and against one another, competing for a high-powered job at a mysterious company, details leak about the futuristic and damaged world they live in.

Part sci-fi, part thriller, part horror movie, with a cast including Luke Mably and Jimi Mistry, Exam is tight, smooth and entertaining in the words of critics on the ground in Edinburgh. It's "an intiguing puzzle of a film," says Miles Fielder in The Herald, while Nev Pierce of Empire is particularly impressed. It's, "a fascinating battle of wits and hits ... I suspect the film itself will reward repeated viewing, despite its confined setting, rather like Vincenzo Natali's Cube did in 1997... Call it The Apprentice Cubed -- a smart genre thriller of a kind too little seen from the UK. Hazeldine; you're hired."

Sir Sean Connery and his wife attend the Homecoming Scotland party.

Talking to Rotten Tomatoes, writer/director/producer Stuart Hazeldine said that the project was borne out of a brainstorm with his friend, Simon Garrity. "He said he had an idea for a short film where a bunch of school kids go into an exam hall and they turn their pieces of paper over and they're blank. I thought there was something interesting about the idea of the blank piece of paper but I started thinking, What if you raised the stakes and made it about a job interview? How frustrating and disorienting would it be to be prepared for nothing?"

Hazeldine, who is already making waves as a screenwriter in Hollywood working on an adaptation of Milton's Paradise Lost and with Alex Proyas on his next project, is shopping the film to distributors at the festival, so there's no telling when it'll eventually hit cinema screens. What is certain, though, is that it's not a film to miss and Hazeldine is a director to watch in years ahead.

Check out our gallery of shots from the photo call for Exam yesterday. Click here.

Also at the festival yesterday, Sir Sean Connery celebrated all things Scottish with invited guests including director Joe Wright and Frank Langella at the Homecoming Scotland party. Homecoming Scotland is an events programme running all year celebrating the culture and history of the country, and guests at the party dined on Haggis and Stovies and enjoyed locally-produced bitter and whisky.

Check out our gallery of shots from the Homecoming Scotland party last night. Click here.

What's On Today

Roger Corman Retrospective by Kim Newman
Every day during the festival, Edinburgh will be showing one of B-movie legend Roger Corman's classics, leading up to a Q&A with the man himself -- hosted by our very own Kim Newman - on Wednesday 24th. In celebration, Kim will be reviewing each of the films playing as part of our coverage of the festival.

- The Intruder - Screening at 13:00, Filmhouse 1
Famous as a rare Roger Corman movie not to turn a profit on its original release, this adaptation of a novel by Charles Beaumont was a hot potato in pre-civil rights 1961. An outside agitator (William Shatner), sporting Satanic sunglasses, comes to a small Southern town to whip up mob frenzy against racial integration in school. A sincere, well-researched exposé of horrible conditions, it's also not an atypical Corman film, with Shatner managing a performance of Vincent Price-like intensity as another mad visionary in dark glasses and a story that gets wuickly away from politics into Poe-ish Southern gothic melodrama.

Today's Highlights
Keep an eye out for these films amongst those playing at the festival today, Saturday 20th May.

- Wide Open Spaces -- Screening at 19:00, Cameo 1
Celtic comedy with Ardal O'Hanlon and Ewan Bremner from the co-creator of Father Ted.

- Black Dynamite -- Screening at 21:00, Filmhouse 1
Hilarious Blaxsploitation spoof with Michael Jai White silencing jive turkeys and sleeping with bitches.

- Moon -- Screening at 21:00, Cameo 1
Duncan Jones directs Sam Rockwell in this atmospheric tale of an astronaut stuck on the Moon.

- Long Weekend -- Screening at 23:30, Cameo 1
Remake of the classic Ozsploitation horror about a couple who neglect nature only for nature to get its own back. Jim Caviezel stars.

To book tickets for these films, click here. Join us again soon for more on these films and the Edinburgh Film Festival 2009.