Hail, Glasgow Film Festival! Anticipation for the coming 2016 edition of the fast-growing film fest reaches new heights today with the exciting announcement of its opening night film, the UK premiere of the Coen Brothers' Hail, Caesar! on Wed 17 Feb.

Hard to oversell this one: it’s a brilliant scoop for GFF programmers and comes fresh from the film’s world premiere in Berlin. Starring George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson and Tilda Swinton, the Coens’ latest hijinks, screwball comedy promises to make good on that old ‘crowd-pleaser’ cliché as it lampoons Hollywood’s Golden Age and, like all good Coen films, features kidnapping, cryptic ransom notes and a red hot ensemble.

‘We like to open the festival with something special to build audience excitement for the fortnight of films to come, and Hail, Caesar! is as big and beautiful a film as you can get,’ says festival co-director Allison Gardner.

Equally impressive is the festival’s closer and UK premiere, Anomalisa, Charlie Kaufman’s unique stop-motion animation, which won the Grand Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2015 and, quite frankly, looks scary good. Being a Kaufman joint, this shouldn't come as a surprise, but watching the trailer, you sense this is a film that will take audiences to places few other filmmakers have the vision to discover, let alone the courage to explore.

Festival co-director Allan Hunter enthuses, ‘Charlie Kaufman has a rare ability to blow your mind and warm your heart at the same time. Anomalisa is a one of kind experience that finds incredible depths of human emotion in the plight of its stop-motion animated characters. I am so thrilled that we will be closing with the UK premiere of one of the year’s most unforgettable films.’

These two films join a fun lineup of previously announced special events, including Raiders of the Lost Ark at Kelvingrove and The Man Who Fell to Earth at Glasgow Science Centre Planetarium. All is boding well for another year of cinephile heaven in Glasgow this February, with the full scheduled announced Wed 20 Jan.

Tickets for Opening and Closing Night Galas on sale Mon 18 Jan. Glasgow Film Festival takes place Wed 17–Sun 28 Feb.