Septimo was the third of the Spanish film festival offerings that I saw.  A father sets off to take his children to school.  He takes the lift down from the seventh floor of their apartment building.  The kids run down the stairs.  Who will be first to the bottom?  It's their regular game but this time when daddy arrives at street level no children are to be seen.  The film is a kidnapping drama with its fair share of blind alleys and hopeful leads.  There's a little twist but it's a pretty conventional piece, entertaining enough and with nice shots of Buenos Aires.

Irrational Man was unconventional in as much as it was a Woody Allen movie in which he didn't appear as an anguished out of luck pursuer of the fair sex.  But he had a proxy.  I largely shared the critics' verdict of underwhelming but it was a decent journeyman product and the baddie got his comeuppance.

The wrongdoing of the protagonist in 99 Homes is overturned by the end of the film although in his case it's more a question of his innate goodness rising from the depths to which he has sunk.  This was an excellent, gripping tale of how a young man, evicted from his home thanks to nasty bankers wanting their money aided and abetted by a hardboiled estate agent/property speculator and desperate to get his home back, becomes an evictor himself.  Natch he loses the love and respect of his family in the process, suffers inner turmoil etc.  Eventually he sees the light and makes a heroic return to save a fellow suburbanite from homelessness.  Sounds banal, but a very good film.

And then a very good play performed well nigh to perfection by Bill Paterson and Brian Cox celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Lyceum Company with Becket's Waiting for Godot.  I saw several productions in the first couple of years after Tom Fleming took on the Lyceum in 1965 but can't say any have sprung to mind so far but I've ordered a copy of the book they've produced about those fifty years and look forward to having my memory prompted.

I've seen Waiting for Godot several times, not least a Kitwe production, though the one that sticks in my memory as being excellent was a previous Lyceum production.  This one seemed to bring out more comedy at the expense of its pessimism about existence.

There was nothing pessimistic about a wine and munchies get-together at the weekend where as well as being drunk the wines were scored by the participants and the person whose wine got the highest marks was rewarded with the accumulated differences between the price paid for each wine and the upper price limit of ten quid.  I didn't win but my wine was the best all the same.