Thursday, 28 May 2026

Mirth and its Relation to The Unconscious : Holding the mirror up to The Void

Mirth and its Relation to The Unconscious : Holding the mirror up to The Void

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2025 (23 October to 2 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 May

Mirth and its Relation to The Unconscious Holding the mirror up to The Void




















Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 23 May 2026

Bertha Strunk [sic] and Barbara Strozzi (perhaps an accreting series of Tweeets ?)

Bertha Strunk [sic] and Barbara Strozzi (perhaps an accreting series of Tweeets ?)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2025 (24 October to 2 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 May

Bertha Strunk [sic] and Barbara Strozzi (perhaps an accreting series of Tweeets ?)















































Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 13 March 2026

'Without matching known proverbs' : #aisplaining and bleeding a hawk in a halter

'Without matching known proverbs' : #aisplaining and bleeding a hawk in a halter

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2025 (23 October to 2 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 March

'Without matching known proverbs' : #aisplaining and bleeding a hawk in a halter










Maybe more to come... ?









Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday, 4 February 2026

Decisions, Decisions : A friendly, flirtatious and very funny comedy-gig with Nerine Skinner

Decisions, Decisions : A friendly, flirtatious and very funny comedy-gig with Nerine Skinner

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2025 (23 October to 2 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

3 February

Decisions, Decisions : A friendly, flirtatious and very funny comedy-gig with Nerine Skinner

- or, maybe, was it ? -

Flirtatiously frank and very, very funny : Nerine Skinner at Aces and Eights, NW5


Decisions, Decisions, Nerine Skinner's new show / work in progress [metaphor for life, there ?], is a quickly paced, revelatory parade that no one need rain on. (Not that anyone tried, in what looked to be a fairly benign group of people on a Tuesday night, but perhaps everyone somehow simply knows when in the presence of someone who has faced, and can handle, far tougher situations than some would-be heckler ?)

At least on this occasion, since a principal point of Decisions, Decisions is that much is undetermined or open to change (although some planning had necessarily been behind being able to give us, in its own person, a neglected bottle of Port's perspective on us and our fickle, seasonal tastes), she opened it with a song about, er, decisiveness, and, when it came to closing, it was with something that we had helped co-create.

(As those can attest who had already seen her perform a classic Streisand number – aptly re-purposed for topicality –Skinner sings (and dances) both confidently and very well (as well as, yes, being keenly attuned to comically delivering neatly thought-through lyrics). And we were to hear a little about why.)


And in between... ? For brides, apparently, something old, something new, and so on, are required, and, in our corsages, we were given, as well as a reprise of #LizzyBoots (who had haunted her Edinburgh shows in 2024), fresh characters, either embodied or aptly summed up (and always with a winsome smile), who also like to pin their self-interest on their lapels, but nonetheless expect the fragrance of their pendant bloom to entice us.

If, as it should, that wording sounds not a little fruity, Skinner makes her show and what she tells us about herself flirtatiously blue [a slipped-in line about 'his cream-filled horn' stands, as it were, out !] and can effortlessly borrow our attention and sense of intrigue. Yet all in a blend of knowingly energetic flirtatiousness that strongly speaks simultaneously of empowerment and vulnerability, and of being well aware of, if lured by, the ways of the world.

Stories told, to strong humorous effect, from (or not implausibly from ?) her own experience, in which, if one wanted to pick out a linking theme or motif, one might be the things that one sometimes has to do to in life just to get, or try out for, a gig (or even in order to get by so that one has a chance to do so) – another might be those mismatches between what those in prominent positions in life do and what they would nonetheless have us believe that they value.


Go see for yourself anyway – remembering that the thing about live is that you never get quite the same show twice, but that your love, applause and presence are truly part of it, and they make it whatever it will be !



End-notes :

* And, in fact, the alternative possibility for opener was also given for our appreciation and appraisal. (In the spirit of co-production, we had been asked and had wanted to see it.)





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 15 January 2026

Reacting to The Housemaid (2025) : A series of Tweeets (work in progress)

Reacting to The Housemaid (2025) : A series of Tweeets (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2025 (23 October to 2 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 January

Reacting to The Housemaid (2025) : A series of Tweeets (work in progress)




































End-notes (may be spoilers) :






Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday, 4 November 2025

Report from Cambridge Film Festival : A [non-spoilery] review of Sirāt (2025) [final proof]

Report from Cambridge Film Festival : A [non-spoilery]review of Sirāt (2025) [final proof]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2025 (23 October to 2 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 October

Report from Cambridge Film Festival : A [non-spoilery]review of Sirāt (2025) [final proof]
As with Pyre (2024), also seen and reviewed by #UCFF at Cambridge Film Festival 2025, the larger the screen on which one can seeSirāt (2025), the better : vivid landscapes and the scale of human-beings in relation to them are central to what informs and – if the unintended pun may stand – drives the cinematic purpose.

We open with shapes in close up that we may quickly comprehend, then draw out to an assemblage or array of them, in a place and a pattern that is extremely dramatic, but, as we will find, nothing (or little) will be or remain as clear as this for long.

During a title-sequence that, by caption, slowly starts to identify our players amongst hundreds of others¹, and then, in what initially and immediately follows, takes us more and more into a mix that is, deliberately, visually indistinct and obscure, we are perhaps already wondering – although we need not ! – how what we know so far, or have seen, can sustain another 105 mins :

Purely as perceiving viewers who nonetheless co-create an understanding of this film's world and reach, this is one metaphor for life amongst others. Such metaphors will prove to be various, be they ones involved with rebellious flight or foolish quest, or of emotional challenge, seeking to avoid conflict, or puzzlement mixed with the threat of likely annihilation.




At the level of its cast, it is hard to think of anyone of the stature of Sergi López² who would have been more suitable 'to anchor' the small group of actors in this filmic endeavour – someone with a presence, but also a sense of wounding-because-wounded vulnerability [the literal meaning, or etymology, of 'vulnerable' (the link is to the OED)].
That said, and although López (as Luis) is vital to the success of Sirāt, it is cohesion and a congruence that he, with his son Esteban (played by Bruno Núñez Arjona), bring to the whole picture – just as, when in front of a canvas by, say, Kandinsky or Miró, an apparently intruding element, if obscured with one's finger or thumb, can in this way be seen to serve the purpose of balancing other elements in the composition :
These actors, with no or next to industry-level credits (outside t.v. series Arte Journal (1998)) [in the case, say, of Jade Oukid or Tonin Janvier], will almost certainly be unfamiliar, but are in no way less individually and dynamically central to all that we witness through and alongside them.


Sirāt comes to a close with an increasingly heightened strangeness, which maybe might, for those who had seen Woman at War (2018), have unhelpfully caused one to recall it. (Yet, there, it was as if the directions in which the script had taken off [or, perhaps, it effectively had already not taken us with it ?], of twins and an escape, had still led to a dead end where we saw what we perhaps knew peter out (or it just felt like a convenient cop-out³ ?).)

By contrast, the cinematic strengths of Sirāt (2025) help us stay what's a very harrowing course : it is a film that starts with existential confusion and, after journeying painfully, and shockingly, into the unknown ‒ into the unfathomable ‒ concludes in a mystery.




As seemed entirely apt, the whole credit-sequence played without the house-lights coming up⁴. (If anyone did leave during the closing-credits, they were respectful of that mystery, and of the mood at the end of and resulting from the film, and had left very quietly.) This practice lets us immerse ourselves in the long list of all who - whatever exactly it had been. Part of making what we had seen, part of the mysterious and eminently self-referential powers - as those of music itself are, and which this film celebrates conjointly ! - of cinema.


End-notes :

¹ Although, at times, the impression or illusion that there were hundreds or more did not seem maintained ?

² Known to #CameraCatalonia audiences from La vida lliure (2017) or La propera pell (The Next Skin) (2016), let alone Pan's Labyrinth (2006).

³ It certainly did not, although perhaps intended to be one, feel like an indicator that Woman at War II would happily pick up where it left off, but more like a cop-out of an ending.

⁴ To #UCFF, it is always appropriate and should be obligatory.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 27 October 2025

Report from Cambridge Film Festival : [Non-spoilery] responses to Pyre (2024)

Some [non-spoilery] responses to Pyre (2024)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2025 (23 October to 2 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 October

Some [non-spoilery] responses to Pyre (2024)

As one can perceive, Pyre (2024) needs to be seen on the biggest screen available, and it is, one suspects, a film that would bear watching again, even if one knows 'where it is going', because one would follow the journey differently, with a different attention, and would see or understand things afresh along the way.

We were told, when the film was introduced, that its principals, Padam Singh and Hira Devi, are not professional actors (and not a couple), but local to where the film is set, yet, without its very location, it would not simply be a chamber-play (even if some patterns of behaviour have become relational tics, which might remind, say, of dialogue in Beckettt's, Fin de partie (Endgame) or En attendant Godot (Waiting for G.).)



The film would not exist without its setting*, which is part and parcel of Bubu / Padam and Aama / Tulsi and of their (way of) life* : living where they do is part of them, and the scope of the film - even though it is not wholly linear - is, partly, a consideration of what that comes to mean. (Partly also, which it shows or presents (and does not seek to explain), are the connections in terms of daily practice, family and its norms, belief, topography and humanity.)


The principals and their tensions may feign some things, but they do not, and cannot, pretend about what has underpinned their life and what living where they do encompasses, involves and means. Taking us as we are, and where it does, each of the film's scenes builds on what preceded it. It may have one puzzling and guessing, yet its messages are true to our shared nature, even though it is in the world of another continent and culture.

Pyre shocks, and yet it does not shock, and is gentle in showing a marriage into its seventh decade where there are nonetheless warring, but loving tensions, and without lying about the harshnesses of living and of unsought change.



End-notes

* If so, it would not be so different from Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), although that tells – or attempts to tell ? – a tale of people alongside national politics (or, at any rate, a different kind of such politics).)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday, 14 October 2025

Observations, by Tweeet, on A House of Dynamite (2025) (an accreting series)

Observations, by Tweeet, on A House of Dynamite (2025) (an accreting series)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2025 (23 October to 2 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 October

Observations, by Tweeet, on A House of Dynamite (2025) (an accreting series)












































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Friday, 4 April 2025

Top Tips for Cambridge Drawing Society's Spring Show, which finishes on Saturday 9 April 2022

The Agent's Top Tips for Cambridge Drawing Society's Autumn Show (on till Saturday 9 April)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

29 October

The Agent's Top Tips for Cambridge Drawing Society's Autumn Show, currently on at The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, but finishing at 4.00 p.m. on Saturday 9 April 2022


In what follows, a figure in bold face denotes the numbered screen on which each work is hanging (unless preceded by a 'W', for 'Wall' - in the main exhibition space) ; the standard of work is generally very high, but the factor on which an item appears here is based, trying to look at every work on show, on listing those that ought to stand the test of time, by being looked at anew each time in The Agent's eyes, rather than delivering one, however impressive, bundle of impressions on first being viewed.


Highly commended, including Best in show (as voted by #UCFF), in alphabetical order (of artist) :

• 22 : A Breath of Fresh Air ~ Sue Walker

• 30 : A New Day ~ Ann Massing

• 86 : Autumn Trees ~ Cathy Parker

• 86 : Birch Woods ~ Cathy Parker

• 66 (?) : Blue Composition (?) ~ Christine Lockwood

• 60 : Byron's Pool ~ Katy Bailey

• 33 : Cherries ~ Rachel Haynes

• 55 : Chicken ~ Svetlana Baibekova

• 4 : Dandelions in a Jam Jar ~ Carol Whitehouse

• 20 : Ethel ~ Sara Woodall

• 39 : Green Cavern ~ Maggie Ecclestone

• 84 : Harbour Lights Honfleur ~ Vivienne Machell

• 39 : Joseph's Rock ~ Maggie Ecclestone

• W2 : Landscape No. 1 : Complications ~ Christine Lafon

• 59 : Mow Fen XVIII ~ Iona Howard

• 91 : Myrtle ~ Yvonne Jerrold

• 72 : On The Level ~ Janet Gammans

• 25 : The Pond ~ Mary Seymour

• 72 : Silent Fen ~ Janet Gammans

• 3 : Snow Berries and Rosehips ~ Carol Whitehouse

• 36 : Stare ~ Rob Jones

• 8 : Strawberries ~ Lydumila Sikhosana

• 28 : Tied Up ~ Alan Noyes

• 2 : Trinity Lane, Cambridge ~ Yang Yuxin

• 10 : Winter Hillside, Islay ~ Jill Ogilvy




Also mentioned in dispatches (likewise in alphabetical order (of title)) :

• 39 : Arthur's Cave~ Maggie Ecclestone

• 91 : Big Little Owl ~ Yvonne Jerrold

• W3 : Blizzard ~ Ann Gascoine

• 60 : Brancaster Staithe ~ Dan Walmsley

• 71 : Channel Island Porcelain ~ Bill Everett

• W3 : Fleam Dyke, Springtime ~ Hatty Richmond

• 31 : Frozen in Time I ~ Liz Hales

• 15 : King's Cross ~ Willy (Willie ?) Wilson

• 49 : Long Shadows ~ Caroline Furlong

• 60 : Looming ~ Katy Bailey

• 10 : Mountain Stream ~ Jill Ogilvy

• W3 : Dr. Pat Owens ~ John Glover

• 32 : Rosy Glow ~ Chris Lockwood

• 6 : Shoreline ~ Elaine Purcell

• 30 : Silver Sunset ~ Ann Massing

• 50 : The Staithe ~ Alan Noyes

• 55 : Vietnam ~ Svetlana Baibekova




Also ran :

• 86 : Paul Edwards appears to like Bridget Riley's Hesitate (19??) [and, perhaps, her Fall (1963)] enough to meld his style with hers by way of pastiche

• 80 – 81 : In his turn, Geoff Goddard looks to like Gerhard Richter's photo-realism and also the style of his model – 4 x variants





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 3 June 2024

The #NakedHobMice Tweeets

The Reggie Perrin Tweets

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)



The Reggie Perrin Tweets

















Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 17 May 2024

Secret histories of code-breaking : #TheCodicoteCodex

Secret histories of code-breaking : #TheCodicoteCodex

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 May

Secret histories of code-breaking : #TheCodicoteCodex












































Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 10 May 2024

#ExamTime in, and at, an uncertain age : ai-powered approaches to question-setting

#ExamTime in, and at, an uncertain age : ai-powered approaches to question-setting

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

10 May

#ExamTime in, and at, an uncertain age : ai-powered approaches to question-setting

In memoriam, Charles Hunt, RIP






Maybe coming to a universe of examination-halls* near you (soon)... ?
/div>





* You know the ones : where you're suddenly aware that you are still wearing your slippers, or pyjamas - or that you forgot to revise !




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 4 May 2024

Some Twaddle about The Scottish Play...

Some Twaddle about The Scottish Play...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

4 May

Some Twaddle about The Scottish Play...






With any luck, popular acclaim won't require any more on this...




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 26 April 2024

Thirteen Tweeets about Civil War (2024) : #CivilWarAndAlexGarland (work in progress)

Thirteen Tweeets about Civil War (2024) : #CivilWarAndAlexGarland (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)



Thirteen Tweeets about Civil War (2024) : #CivilWarAndAlexGarland (work in progress)











More to come...






































Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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