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In this special edition of Film Weekly, Jason Solomons and Xan Brooks sum up 2009 by counting down their respective top 10s of the year's best movies. There's also a competition for loyal listeners – up for grabs is a Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee prize pack, with a mug, DVD and poster signed by director Shane Meadows. Just listen to the montage of four directors who have featured in In the Director's Chair, identify them and email your answers to film.weekly@guardian.co.uk by 5 January 2010.

Looking back over the year, both critics agree that 2009 was a great year for small films that said big things, while Hollywood enjoyed huge commercial success but appeared to have nothing to say. The long-awaited release of Avatar signalled a change in format, yet did not change the way we see the world.

And then it's down to the main order of business: Jason and Xan's...

Roadie. Washout. Reluctant father. Meet Le Donk, self styled music industry maven - his hopes pinned to the skills of chunky Midlands rapper Scor-Zay-Zee and a hail-Mary plan to somehow squeeze his young prodigy on to the lineup of a massive Arctic Monkeys outdoor gig that he's working in Manchester.  The mad thing is it just might work.

The product of a long running collaboration between actor Paddy Considine and director Shane Meadows, Le Donk and Scor-Zay-Zee is the sort of film that could only have been created by close friends in an incredibly trusting environment.  The Le Donk character is one originally created by Considine and Meadows when the duo collaborated back in 2002 on Meadows' Once Upon A Time In The Midlands, the burned out roadie first appearing in an accompanying short film.  There have been rumors of a feature dedicated to the character ever since, at one point...

Drag Me To Hell

Finally Sam Raimi gets back to what he does best. A damn good splatter-fest that is as funny as it is scary. Alison Lohman turns in a brilliant performance as Christine Brown, a normal young woman who works at an L.A. loan company. After she refuses the mysterious Mrs Ganush an extension on her loan to impress her boss she finds herself on the receiving end of a very nasty curse that transforms her life quite literally into a living hell. Asking for help from a psychic to reverse the curse Christine finds herself in a race against time and in the end she has to choose exactly how far she is prepared to go in order to break the spell.

This is fantastic filmmaking. It moves at a break-neck speed and offers moments that will make you jump miles off of your seat. Forget Spider-Man 4,...

Shane Meadows has admitted that he is keen to make more movies starring his and Paddy Considine's comedy creation Le Donk. Speaking to Digital Spy, the Brit filmmaker said that he would be eager to direct another feature with Le Donk, a roadie with delusions of grandeur, as long as it could be done on a low budget. "I'd love to do it again," said Meadows. "I wouldn't want to go out again if we were making it for three million quid. I'd only go back, and I'm sure Paddy's the same, we'd only go back if we kept it as lo-fi. That was what was fun about it, that (more)...

Le Donk rapper Scor-zay-zee has revealed that he used to vomit before performing. The Nottingham musician, who appears with Paddy Considine in this week's Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee, told Digital Spy that nerves would often overcome him before he went out on stage. "There was occasions when I used to do gigs, I used to be sick," he said. "[I'd] spew up then go on stage. I always say the first five, 10 seconds are nerve-wracking, but once you're (more)...

Shane Meadows has said that working on lower-budget movies helps keep him alive as a filmmaker. The This Is England director has made Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee as part of the 5 Day Features project with Warp Films producer Mark Herbert. Meadows told The Observer: "People might say, 'Oh, it's just them having a laugh', but it's more than that. I'd like to knock one of these out every couple of years between bigger-budget stuff. "There's no one to fetch you a coffee or wipe your arse when you're doing three (more)...

  TotalFilm.com favourites Shane Meadows and Paddy Considine - the team behind the fantastic Dead Man's Shoes - have been hard at work on a brand new project; a music mockumentary called Le Donk. Recently retitled, Le Donk and Scor-zay-zee follows Paddy Considine's legendary roadie Le Donk as he attempts to get his protoge, up coming Nottingham rapper Scor-zay-zee (Dean Palinczuk), on stage with the Arctic Monkeys. Sitting somewhere between This Is Spinal Tap and Steve Coogan's Tommy Saxondale, this is the first of...

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Write what you know, the old chestnut echoes, and that's precisely what celebrated British filmmaker Shane Meadows has been doing since his 1997 feature debut "TwentyFourSeven." Meadows' naturalistic, working class dramas all seem to be at least partly based on real-life experiences, from the drug-addled friend who was bullied into suicide -- the inspiration behind his revenge thriller "Dead Man's Shoes" -- to the violence-prone skinhead pals from his youth that turn up in "This is England." One of the films is even entitled "Once Upon a Time in the Midlands," which is precisely where the BAFTA Award-winner was born, raised, and still lives today.

The rare exception to Meadows' typical small-town locales, then, is his latest, "Somers Town," which still features what film buffs might call kitchen-sink realism, but is transplanted to the titular neighborhood in central London. In a second collaboration with young Thomas Turgoose (who stole the show...

It is obvious to any Twitchfilm reader who has been around long enough that we are big fans of English director Shane Meadows and his films A Room For Romeo Brass, Dead Man’s Shoes and This Is England. His latest film Le Donk & Scoz-ayz-ee just premiered at Edinburgh International Film Festival but he gave Empire the skinny on his next big film, a horror film, and one we’ve known about for a while now, Beware the Devil...

“It’s based on a book of the same name, based on the life of a guy who, by getting involved with Ouija boards and the occult by trying to disprove it, trying to take the piss out of it, got possessed, had to be exorcised, and later became an exorcist himself. The guy it happened to has died, but his son’s a novelist, and he helped him turn it...

Filmmaker Shane Meadows ( Dead Man's Shoes ) is going to raise a lil' hell with his next film, Beware the Devil . He tells Empire Magazine, "It's based on a book of the same name, based on the life of a guy who, by getting involved with Ouija boards and the occult by trying to disprove it, trying to take the piss out of it, got possessed, had to be exorcised, and later became an exorcist himself. The guy it happened to has died, but his son's a novelist, and he helped him turn it into a book before he passed away, and now I'm working with him to turn it into a film." Beware the Devil: A True Story of Deliverance was written by Robert Lee and published in 1983. Meadows currently has Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee on the film festival circuit. Devil is just one a...

We’re always happy to catch up with Shane Meadows, especially when he dishes out great news, which seems to be every time we meet. This year’s Edinburgh international Film Festival was certainly no exception, when at the end of a fascinating interview, alongside mate & star Paddy Considine, he was able to confirm a rumour which has been floating about for the last few months: his upcoming horror film will indeed be called Beware The Devil.“Yeah, I’ve got the rights sorted now, so it’s not such a hidden thing,” he told Empire over the course of a long chat about his latest film and festival entry Le Donk & Scoz-ayz-ee. “It’s based on a book of the same name, based on the life of a guy who, by getting involved with ouija boards and the occult by trying to disprove it, trying to take the piss out of it,...

Year: 2009

Directors: Shane Meadows

Writers: Shane Meadows & Paddy Considine

IMDb: link

Trailer: link

Review by: projectcyclops

Rating: 7 out of 10

At last, Shane Meadows has made a straight-up comedy! Not just a comedy, but a Christopher Guest style, ‘Spinal Tap’ inspired faux-rockumentary. Paddy Considine (star of BAFTA winning Christopher Morris short, My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117) plays Le Donk, an irrepressible rock roadie with a pregnant ex-girlfriend (Peep Show’s Olivia Coleman) and a rapper sidekick, whom he’s going to help hit the big-time. Shane himself shows up at Le Donk’s flat with his documentary crew and they follow him on his adventures, touring with The Arctic Monkeys and attempting to gain some recognition for his buddy, real life rapper Scorz-Ayz-Ee, playing himself.

The best thing about Le Donk is that Paddy, Olivia and Shane seem to be the only people fully in on the joke, almost everyone else in...

Shane Meadows is an Edinburgh Film Festival mainstay, having brought most of his body of work to the festival for the last ten years, starting with 1999's A Room For Romeo Brass. So it's entirely fitting that this would be the place to premiere his latest, rock mockumentary Le Donk and Scorz-ayz-ee. Le Donk (Paddy Considine) is a roadie for the Arctic Monkeys and as he's roped in to shift gear for their gig at the Old Trafford Cricket Ground, he brings along his new discovery, rap prodigy Scorz-ayz-ee (actually a real unsigned rapper), and a documentary crew fronted by...