Going through this year's Book Festival programme I identified 57 events of interest.  Over time I managed to cut that list down to a more manageable not to say affordable 12 and when booking opened yesterday got a ticket for all of them.

I think my choices are quite firmly based which is not always the case.  As I sat in the Filmhouse watching Cosmic Eye I wondered what had driven me to choose it.  Animation is not my bag for a start.  It must surely have been the advertised contributions of Benny Carter and Dizzy Gillespie that made me ignore the "rarely screened gem" warning in the festival brochure. Fortunately an afternoon Campari and soda taken to celebrate the arrival of a small table for my balcony induced a fair degree of eyelid droop so there was no lasting damage.

Terminal is all style over substance but none the worse for that.  The director told us that they had wanted to create a neon drenched noir thriller set in a dystopian city that had a London flavour to it.  With a caveat over just how thrilling or not it was, they succeeded.

The cinematography, music, costumes and performances are excellent.  The locations like the deserted railway terminal, the vast industrial building with a bottomless pit at its centre and others are all lit and dressed atmospherically.

But the plot advertised as complex, travels more along the familiar paths of the genre.  Its double crosses and reveals, its denouement's echoes of gathering the suspects and explaining all (albeit there's only one left) hardly breaks new ground or strains the spectator's brain. That may or may not be a good thing in the cinemagoers' eyes.  I hope it's a good thing because the film is fun and deserves to do well.