Review of "Shakespeare" by Bill Bryson

Pleasant, slightly boring (but in a nice read-last-thing-at-night) sort of way, I can't help wondering if this book was really necessary. It's a popularisation of Shakespeare scholarship - what order were the plays written in, what do we really know about his life (very little), and some gentle fun at the expense of Shakespeare-didn't-really-write-them conspiraloons. But did we really need it? Probably not.

Review of Vermiglio

If I don't write the review straight away it never happens.

This was a sad, slightly bleak film about a village in Northern Italy where the men have gone away to the war, and a man from the South (I think a deserter but I'm not sure any more) comes to the village with another man that he has fought alongside, gets a girl pregnant, marries her, then goes back to his home village in the South, where he already has a wife. The first wife shoots him dead when she finds out has happened.

The poster really doesn't convey the content or the tone of the film.

I was left with the thought that this sort of thing - desertion, bigamous marriages, and so on - must have been much more common in the days when bureaucratic systems were less joined up. Is that right?

Watched at Lansdown Film Club.

Review of "Fully Automated Luxury Communism" by Aaron Bastani

I've been reading a series of books about utopias, including William Morris's News From Nowhere and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward...maybe even Red Plenty counts as a sort of account of a socialist utopia, albeit one that goes wrong within the scope of the book. 

So I thought I'd better read this too, as a positive vision of a technology-based socialist society, where abundance liberates everyone from scarcity and drudgery. One of those books that I'd heard about for so long that I had sort of forgotten that I hadn't actually read. 

Well, now I have, and it's a bit underwhelming. The boosterish sections on how amazing technologies are just coming down the pike didn't seem to be very critical, or to have much engagement with how these technologies might affect class relations or the workplace. Sometimes it reminded me of the stuff that I had to sit through from telecoms companies, or of the world visions of capitalist think tanks like the World Economic Forum.

Still, it did remind that I'd previously read and reviewed other things that touch on this, like ‘Inventing the Future’ by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek and even Paul Mason's "PostCapitalism" - it seems hard to recall that Mason once seemed like a quite important socialist intellectual, after his infatuation with Keir Starmer.

Review of The Oslo Trilogy - Love, Sex, and Dreams

Three loosely interlinked films, set in Oslo, and about love, sex and relationships - including how important sex and relationships are to each other. They are all set in Oslo, and glimpses of locations and settings from one film crops up in another. Oslo sometimes looks beautiful, and sometimes a bit bleak and soulless. From the films it seems like the people of Oslo are pretty busy having all kinds of different sex with each other; in one film a guy who is a happily married chimney sweep has sex with a male customer on a whim, and the rest of the film is about whether he and his wife can come to terms with this. 

In another a gay nurse has casual sex with people he meets on the harbour ferry, but the sex is just a way that he can find companionship and intimacy with others; he introduces a woman doctor colleague to the scene, and soon she's meeting people on the ferry too. There is absolutely nothing salacious, or prurient, or arousing, in the way that this is presented - it's just an exploration of how this kind of sex can or can't fit into other kinds of relationship.

The films are all slow and take a while to get going, but they are worth the trouble.

Watched on BFI Player.

Review of Primavera

Beautiful period drama about the young girls orphanage in Venice where Vivaldi spent most of his working life - I had no idea about his story at all, including the fact that he died in poverty and was unknown for 200 years until his work was rediscovered. Lots of unfamiliar stuff here about how Venice treated orphans, including grooming them into talent as musicians and then selling them off to nobles after which they were forbidden to play music any more.

Watched on BFI Player.

Review of Blue Heron

Clever, painful film about a troubled family - Hungarians, but living in British Columbia (Canada), and the parents lives dominated by their inability to do the right thing for their very-troubled teenage son. There's a clever narrative structure which makes the film as much about the unreliability of memory and the burden of unprocessed trauma, but it's hard to say much more without spoiling.

It's very good, well worth watching.

We watched via informal distribution.

Review of Erupcja

We watched this because the film critic of the New Yorker recommended it as one of the three best films of 2026 so far. It wasn't even a bit good. Maybe he gets bored of seeing good films and enjoys the odd bad one. This was dull, uninteresting to look at, badly acted...a young British couple are in Warsaw where the bloke is going to propose to the woman, but she's not keen and runs off to spend the time with her former girlfriend in the city, leaving the bloke lost and confused. Too hard to care about any of them or to take any interest in how it ends.

Review of "Late Fame" by Arthur Schnitzler

Having seen the film, I wanted to read the book...this turned out not to be so easy. It's a tiny book even with forenotes and afternotes, and there's only an expensive hardcover version for sale in the UK. Eventually I found an epub. It turns out that it wasn't published in Schnitzler's lifetime - it was going to be published in a Vienna newspaper, as a short story, but it outgrew that format. Then there was talk of serialisation, but the editor was against because it would break up the flow, so it went back into the drawer.

Probably a good decision - this is one of those cases where the movie was better than the book. It's got more depth and emotion.

Review of Late Fame

Went to see this film because it was on at the Crouch End Art House and we were staying in Crouch End. I thought it was great, Ruth didn't like it at all.

It's about a man who had a brief moment as a poet in the 1970s, and then fell from attention and stopped writing poetry. Now he works in a postal sorting office where he's a regular guy. But one day a smartly dressed young man turns up on his doorstep - he's been "rediscovered" by a little literary circle of young writers. They love him, shower him with enthusiasm, and he starts to hang out with them (even though they are a bit privileged and pretentious, and not obviously very talented), and especially with the glamorous Asian-American femme fatale actor who is part of the circle.

They plan to stage a literary evening to celebrate his reappearance, along with works of their own, and it eventually does happen, and it's not too disastrous, but he comes to realise that everything about them is fake, and he goes back to his old life and his regular-guy bar buddies.

I found it really interesting and moving, and was pleased to see at the end that it was based on a short story by Arthur Schnitzler, who had written "Dream Story" on which "Eyes Wide Shut" was based.

Review of Our Friend

Emotional true-story drama about a young mum (two daughters) who is dying of cancer, and how she, her journalist partner and their somewhat gooseberry-like partner manage their tangled relationships amidst the inevitably of death. I was drawn in despite myself (I don't like films this sad) and thought that it handled a lot of the issues very well without being maudlin or religious about death.

Watched on Channel 4 online.

Review of Charlotte Gray

Better than usual war film based on the Sebastian Faulks book, in which Cate Blanchett plays the Scottish woman parachuted into France to work with the Resistance - though it really isn't clear what she's supposed to be doing, because the radio valves she is bringing are captured by the Germans almost as soon as she arrives, and after that she's mainly floundering. Still, it's a good film, tense and atmospheric without dwelling on the violence too much - there are a lot of guns but not that much shooting. And I could watch Cate Blanchett's weird but beautiful face all day.