Museum Hours

  Cinema going returned.  My love for French cinema was confirmed. My appreciation of the serious, austere and not necessarily ultimately uplifting was present and correct. Vicky Krieps continued to suggest that she is one of the most astounding actors at work at the moment ( Corsage , Hold Me Tight and Bergman Island to add to other stellar outings). Also confirmed was the urgent need to correct weaponised nostalgia and simple stories in favour of complexity, criticism and a warning that the siren voices of creeping social and political authoritarianism have to be confronted.  The usual 10 - 1 ranking follows but there are several films which only just missed the cut which deserve a mention particularly  Corsage ;  Il Buco ;  Bergman Island ;  Flux Gourmet  and  The Quiet Girl . 10. Parallel Mothers :  A tremendous performance from Penelope Cruz who is on screen for almost the entire running time anchors this film which is a stonking great melodrama of the kind that Almodovar can car

  "Everybody’s crazy What’s your excuse baby? Standing in the middle waiting for something to happen." Ah, the lost and greatly lamented Veronica Falls one of my favourite jangly, indie, bubblegum, breathy, Sixties crossed with a Noughties take on Britpop inflected New Wave, covertly energetic, bands. A niche category but a good one. The song is about indecision and prevarication; everyone is as uncertain as everyone else. But perhaps it is also about paralysis in the face of things that are just too big.  In the case of the song, approaching someone you kinda like.  In the case of many humans in the early 2020s, the sense that perhaps everyone really is crazy makes one feel that actually standing in the middle isn't the worst place. The trouble is that the crazies might catch up with you anyway. Waiting no longer feels like just waiting for the weekend, for something to turn up or even to improve. The notion that things might actually get better seems fanciful in itself.

  A book  set  in the past which speaks so loudly to our present times as to be  shouting in our faces. Except that it would do so in the most understated and droll manner behind a distinct partina of politeness and perhaps just a little condescension at our inability to appreciate the true architectonics of our financialised economy and society. One in which transactions are all ultimately mediated through money. It would be unforgivable to say too much about the plot because there are so many delights to be savoured from the gradual unfolding of a series of ventriloquised perspectives on nominally the same events in which who is saying what and why is constantly in play. There is also much joy to be had in considering who might be the model for some of the people at the heart of the novel, notably Andrew Bevel whose ambition to 'bend and align' reality so that he is always shown to have been, well, right is so reminiscent of so many powerful men and their equally powerful sen