William Russell reviews a mixed bunch of international movies

IT was a case of ''Think Pink'' last night at Hopetown House as the elite of Scottish cinema and the usual suspects celebrated the launch of the Scottish Screen Edinburgh International Film Festival . The pink theme was in honour of the opening film, Ma Vie En Rose, Alain Berliner's comedy about a seven year old boy who decides he will grow up to be a girl, a tricky subject handled with delicacy.

There is nothing the matter with The Slab Boys that a different director and better actors would not put right. John Byrne's 1978 play was a theatrical and television landmark in its time, but its time is past. Byrne is too close to his subject for comfort, and his decision to set it in a Paisley that never was is a mistake, even in 1958, the time of the play's action.

Not much of a film director, he proves not much of an actors' director either, eliciting dire performances from the adult players notably Anna Massey (Miss Walkinshaw, the spinster who purloins paints and pencils from the stores to help Phil (Robin Laing), the young Byrne, prepare his art school portfolio), who behaves as if she has just left Manderley in flames. David O'Hara's grotesque leather jacketed thug confirms the promise he displayed in The Near Room.

Newcomers, Robin Laing, Russell Barr and Bill Gardiner as the slab boys acquit themselves well enough and there is no denying the strength of Byrne's writing, but this is a film which, if it had to be made, should have been made by other hands.

David Lynch's Lost Highway is a real treat, however, a classic demonstration of how to use colour and design to real cinematic effect. He has taken the ingredients of the film noir - gullible male, predatory woman who is not what she seems, this instance two women played by the same actress, and underworld characters - and stirred. The result makes no sense, but holds the eye and the attention from start to finish. Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty are the fall guys, Patricia Arquette is Renee, the brunette, and Alice, the blonde, who lure them to their dooms, and Robert Loggia is the malevolent gangster Mr A.

Lots of sex, violence, depravity and all the non sequiturs one expects of Lynch coupled with good performances, especially from Arquette,.

Atom Egoyan's latest film, The Sweet Hereafter, is a moving story which should strike resonances with Scottish audiences in the light of the tragedy of Dunblane, although it is about a very different kind of tragedy. It deals with the impact on a small Canadian community of an accident in which the school bus skids on to an ice covered lake and most of the children are drowned. A lawyer arrives in town to persuade the parents to sue the authorities.

Based on a book by Russell Banks, itself inspired by a real accident, the film does not exploit grief, but attempts to show how different people react to such a tragedy. He has adapted Banks' book considerably, notably inserting a running reference to the Pied Piper of Hamlin, also a story about a community losing its children, and altering the way one of the secrets of the small community - the existence of incest - is revealed.

''Reading Brow-ning's poem I found it clarified the central theme of the novel perfectly,'' he says. ''When the little boy in the film listens to the baby sitter reading it and asks - ''If the Pied Piper was so powerful, how come he didn't make the parents pay him what they owed, instead of punishing them by taking their children away?'' - he asks the question that is at the heart of my film,'' says Egoyan.

The lawyer is played by Ian Holm. ''People in London take him for granted,'' Egoyan says. ''But for the community of actors I work with he is something of a God. Ian is not a star and there are no preconceptions about who he is, and that is liberating. I am not attracted to the star system although there are actors within it whom I admire, like Gene Hackman, but they bring baggage with them to roles. ''

Holm plays the role deliberately with a mid-Atlantic accent because the man is neither a predator nor an ambulance- chaser, but an outsider whose presence forces the townsfolk to review their lives.

For the first time films he has had to use special effects. The bus crash is simulated by computer. ''It did not happen,'' he says. ''It is not a real bus that you see. But the detail is so exact that the ''children'' inside it are the children in the film. I cannot tell you how they got the effects, but I am drawn to what can be done with computer simulation for dramatic ends.''

n The Slab Boys GFT tonight 7.30. Cameo 1 at 10.30, August 18. Lost Highway tonight, 6.30 ABC 2. The Sweet Hereafter. Cameo 1 tonight 10.00. Cameo 1 at 5.30, August 16.