The Week in Entertainment

Film: Beasts of the Southern Wild, an absolutely astonishing movie, lyrical and vibrant and poignant, fierce as its untrained actors and the land they live in. This movie is a joy. Don't miss it.

DVD: The Krotons, a Patrick Troughton Doctor Who, with Jamie and Zoë and monsters that don't quite work visually inside a very good story idea. It's very much too bad the BBC got rid of so much of the early Doctor (and other classics).

TV: Leverage - this was not, to be honest, one of their best. I did like the cheerfully corrupt congressman who greeted everyone with "What do you want and what's it worth to you?" but the story just never really gelled. Caught up on Futurama, and was quite touched by the Professor's parents episode.

Read: The Gallows in My Garden, an old (1950s) murder mystery about a WWII vet turned PI. Also the astonishing The Light Between Oceans about another vet, this one an Australian WWI soldier, who retreats from the chaotic mess of the battlefield to the austere order of the Offshore Lights - only to have the world intrude in the shape of a dinghy bearing a dead man and a live baby. His wife, who's miscarried three times, convinces him to pretend the baby is theirs... but the baby's mother is not drowned, and things become complicated and painful for everyone. A gem of a novel.