In a short time, this will be... a long time ago

The cinema hasn't featured in my life much recently, but suddenly I've been twice in fourteen hours. Firstly I saw 'Slow West', a western from last year that will appeal to anyone who liked Tarantino's 'Hateful Eight'. It's leisurely and amusing, interspersed with bloody violence. Look out for some literal visual interpretation of proverbs; I spotted 'salt in the wounds' and 'giving an arm and a leg'. Then, by way of a change, I went to see Woody Allen's latest 'Café Society'. It's set partly among 1930's New York organised crime gangs and so there is violence here as well. In what I thought was the one thing wrong with what is otherwise a fine, if typical, Allen film, the violence is made a source of amusement and somehow our hero is allowed to drift through untainted by it. There's nothing revolutionary about this film - the other setting is golden age Hollywood as already seen this year in 'Hail Ceasar' and the main theme of the film isn't that dissimilar to that in Ayckbourn's 'Relatively Speaking' which I saw at the theatre the other week - but it's highly enjoyable. The elder Miss Epictetus with whom I saw it - she leaves for pastures new on Wednesday - assures me that Kristen Stewart is a lot better here than in the Twilight films, and Jesse Eisenberg gives a pitch perfect impersonation of Woody Allen.

And staying on the gangster theme, here's an in memoriam tribute to the great Prince Buster