Valerie a Týden Divu / Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970 Jaromil Jires)

About as close to a dream as you can get, whilst remarkably holding the attention, and quite unlike anything I've seen, inspiring thoughts of Cocteau, Borowczyk and Rollin. Film writer Michael Brooke usefully introduces us to poetist author Vitezlav Nezval, inspired by Gothic literature and dream theory, and film collaborator and writer Ester Krumbachova (you start sounding very intelligent rolling names like this off the tongue), and argues that the film is not strictly surrealist and it's not 'continually trying to subvert a world view'. He also points to the influence on Angela Carter's 'Company of Wolves'.

The kaleidoscope of dream / flawed logic ('I've never had a girlfriend before'), startling imagery (birds, weasels, fire, horses), characters whose identities constantly change, shifts of mood, the familiar in the bizarre, are stunningly shot by Jan Curik and scored by Lubos Fiser. The flashes of nude grapplings are not as erotic as claimed and seeing as Jaroslava Schallerová actually was thirteen at the time, it's probably just as well.

An Education (2009 Lone Scherfig)

Carey Mulligan (BAFTA), Peter Sarsgaard (what a shit!), Alfred Molina, Olivia Williams (teacher), Rosamund Pike (her face of boredom in classical concert is brilliant), Dominic Cooper, Cara Seymour (mother), Emma Thompson.

scr Nick Hornby from Lynne Barber memoir
Ph. John de Borman

49th Parallel (1941 Michael Powell)

I really don't know where Powell was going with this one: where's the great talent he supposedly surrounds himself with? In this paltry assemblage, he finds Oscar-winning Pressburger, David Lean as editor, Frederick Young on camera and some dude named Vaughan Williams composing, and could then only find the likes of Olivier, Leslie Howard, Eric Portman, Anton Walbrook and Raymond Massey to act in it.

The German U-Boat crew are memorably nasty, except of course for nice Raymond Lovell, who's shot for wanting to be a baker. Damn those Nazis!

Une Femme Douce (1969 Robert Bresson)

After Une Femme Douce was over Q asked me if it was good, and I said "I don't know"... It has an astonishing opening and its treatment of the relationship of Dominique Sanda and Guy Franqin is typically lean and Bressonian. It's one of his 'lucid' films, his first in colour (Ghislain Cloquet again), and very hard to get hold of, even in France.