People write theses about you lot you know (and about me for that matter!): academic treatises about what makes audiences tick and what makes them go to one kind of cinema, and one kind of film, before another. We at Filmhouse spend a lot of time pondering that as well. With a limited number of cinema screens of a far from infinite capacity, we have to take a best guess at which screen we should put a film in. (Sometimes, of course, we have contractual obligations to film distributors insisting on our big screen for their new releases, so our hands are often tied – but not always.) And you’d be surprised at how often we get it right! You would, really!

But just when we think we’ve got a handle on you, you confound us, and we realise that what William Goldman (in his book ‘Adventures in the Screen Trade’) said about Hollywood, in terms of its ability to know which films people will go see and which they won’t – “Nobody Knows Anything” – applies equally to us. So, indulge me. I’m going to make a prediction, and let’s see how I do. We have a rare screening of Joseph Losey’s The Servant (a special BFI Archive ‘Treasures’ print, screening as part of a short Losey retrospective) on Sunday 19th July at 5:30pm, and I predict 125 people will attend. Watch this space... Go on, confound me!

Sandwiching another marvellous edition of EIFF, here’s what we have on in June and July. From France, Anything For Her (Pour elle) is a tense, gripping thriller in which a man must free his wife from jail in a race against time; Johnny Depp plays bank robber John Dillinger in Michael Mann’s stunning evocation of Depression-era America, Public Enemies; from Sweden, Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments is old-fashioned arthouse cinema at its very best; veteran director Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn tells the harrowing story of a Soviet atrocity against the Polish people in WWII; and there’s the first opportunity to see Melissa Leo in her recently Oscar®-nominated performance in Courtney Hunt’s richly rewarding Frozen River. The burgeoning genre of the cinematic eco-doc gets another worthy entry with The End of the Line, a stark warning as to the state of the world’s fish stocks, and documentary’s rarely get as edge-of-your-seat as Burma VJ, the story of Burma’s activist-cameramen who risk their lives to get footage out of that ‘closed’ country.

Joseph Losey gets the aforementioned eleven-film retrospective, including the restored Accident and a new digital ‘print’ of The Go-Between; the ever-popular Edinburgh Bike Week Film Festival returns; the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival On Tour pays its annual visit; there’s a season of films from Ireland and four Bollywood classics. There’s also a selection of films from the British New Wave (‘Kitchen Sink Dramas’) of the late 50s/early 60s – a chance to see exactly where Morrissey lifted all those Smiths lyrics from!