‘My Old School’ Film Review: Scottish High-School Documentary Is Enjoyably Odd – for a While

thewrap.com:

almost – to make up for the fact that the story itself is something of a letdown.A classic unreliable-narrator doc, the film is always fun to watch.

But unlike, say, Ramin Bahrani’s “2nd Chance” — a 2022 Sundance doc that is intricately constructed to take the viewer through the twists and evasions doled out by its own unreliable narrator — “My Old School” works hard to put a stylish spin on a story whose surprises are telegraphed from the beginning.It gets off to a promising start, as we see actor Alan Cumming sitting down at a desk in a Scottish classroom, with titles letting us in on the film’s central conceit: “The man at the heart of this story does not want to show his face, but you will hear his voice.

The audio interview he granted will be lip synced by an actor.”So the man, Brandon Lee, tells the story of his days in the early 1990s at Bearsden Academy, a secondary school in an upper-class section of Glasgow, Scotland.

And Cumming sits there and mouths the words in a way that is uncannily accurate and quite entertaining. (It calls to mind Taghi Amirani’s 2019 documentary “Coup 53,” in which Ralph Fiennes was filmed reading the transcript of an interview with a British intelligence agent because the video of that interview had mysteriously disappeared.