If you are in or about Belfast next week, you should check out My Dog Tulip at the Queen’s Film Theatre. It’s a really nice little animated picture based on a miserablist memoir by the excellent J R Ackerley. Why listen to an idiot like me. Pay attention instead to the admirable Roger Ebert. This video features an edited version of the great man’s review from January . But how is this possible? Following surgery for cancer, Ebert has been unable to speak. Perhaps that computer-generated voice he was experimenting with has finally gone live. The story is — for us, if not him — rather more delicious than that. Roger has persuaded Werner Herzog to speak his words. What a wonderful notion. Listening to this clip, one is reminded that the German director really has one of our era’s most distinctive and attractive voices. For all his Teutonic nihilism — “I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder” — he speaks in a timbre that burbles with warmth and humanity.

A lovely idea. Hats off to all involved.