Unlike the Royal Exchange’s flaccid Blithe Spirit at Christmas, this Library company production is a cracker, bringing alive Wilde’s witty social observations with pace, timing and verve.

It runs until 3 July and tickets are selling out fast.

They are so astonishingly lifelike that you almost wonder if they are actually not sculptures, but real people. Did he blink? This despite the fact that Wild Man, 2005 is a giant, and Spooning Couple, 2005 consists of two tiny figures you could hold almost in the palm of your hand. You want to go right up to them and examine every hair on their bodies, every fold of skin. Yet such is the realism, it feel intrusive to do so! Shh! Don’t wake them!

In the adjacent room, are ten works from the Frank Cohen Collection. There’s the haunting Between Men and Animal (2005), an oil painting of laughing, mocking faces by Chinese artist Yue Minjun. You can’t fail to smile at a life-sized polar bear balancing upside down nose to nose on a little boy in the sculpture The Big Kiss, 2007 by Chen Lei. Again, this exhibition finishes 11 April.

We settled in to our seats, and began the process of mentally zoning out all the distractions around us. The talkers, the texters, the sweetie rustlers. The latecomers, the ones making a dash out to the loo.

I had just about managed to achieve a state of zen when a young woman sat next to me and explained that she would be eating her dinner – a Nando’s take away.

Perhaps it was such external irritations and distractions which conspired to dampen my excitement for the film itself. For whatever reason I felt it to be a bit, well, flat. I don’t just mean that the 3D effects were quite subtle, but more that I didn’t find myself entering the fantasy world on-screen.

I could sit there appreciating the visuals and some of the acting, but nothing excited, delighted or scared me. Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole should have been a stomach-turning rollercoaster, for example. It went throught the motions, but was pretty unexciting. The colours are less than vibrant a lot of the time, and the musical score is an almost constant portentious drone rising and falling with the changes in dramatic tempo.

Johnny Depp is at his child-like innocent best of course as the whimsical Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter does an entertaining Miranda Richardson impression as the Red queen. But overall, I have to say that Disney has done to Lewis Carroll what Nando’s have done to chicken. What you get from these large corporations is a product. Acceptable standard fare to a formula worked out by back-room teams with an eye on the bottom line. If you are looking for haute cuisine, then best to move along.

The film ends as he is preparing to go to Hamburg, and The Beatles are not mentioned by name, but they were about to shake the world in ways which nobody at the time could have foreseen. The credits soundtrack is Lennon’s Mother, an anguished elegy for his mum Julia. Her virtual abandonment of him caused so much pain, undoubtedly shaped his personality and – crucially – influenced his writing and his music. Perhaps this was the grit in the oyster, helping to produce the pearls which are the songs of Lennon and McCartney.

Of course it’s impossible to imagine how the world would look now if it hadn’t been for the impact of The Beatles. But whether you listen to their music or not, they were prime movers in a post-war revolution which changed Western society and the way we think about ourselves.

The film contained one or two anachronisms. Too much cigarette smoking, even for the 1950′s. Modern beer glasses, the word ‘band’ instead of ‘group’, and I don’t think ‘gig’ was in common usage. Also, before the sexual revolution, girls didn’t fuck boys, boys fucked girls. Some characters are completely omitted from the story.

However, Nowhere Boy does not try to be a completely faithful historical account. The actors are not made up to be look-alikes, and the locations are sympathetic rather than accurate replicas. This is an intelligent approach which works well, and avoids over-detailing which is inevitably distracting.

There are so many pitfalls when making a biopic, but Nowhere Boy avoids all of them. It’s incredibly moving, with an accomplished performance by Aaron Johnson as Lennon, and Kristin Scott Thomas as his somewhat repressed aunt Mimi. Anne-Marie Duff’s portrayal of the histrionic Julia Lennon, and David Morrissey’s Bobby Dykins are note-perfect too. A little gem of a film.

So when the Tannoy in the foyer announced that the show would start half an hour late due to ‘technical difficulties’ I was not completely surprised. That would be the technical difficulty of ringing one or more absent cast members and persuading them that with enough strong coffee and paracetamol they would be able to get through the performance, and that remaining in bed would be a career-limiting decision.

Once it started, some 45 minutes late, the show was a gem. The multi-talented cast were all bright-eyed and the clever set looked like an illustration from a children’s fairy tale book. The production was pacy, fun and imaginative.

The Library Theatre is moving this year after nearly half a century located in the basement of the library. I just hope that they manage to keep doing what they do with the same sparkle in their new venue.

The story line is an uncomplicated allegory, but its simplicity is more than made up for in the incredible visual detail and chest-thumping soundtrack which draw the audience into a quality and richness of experience which is delightful, exciting, at times moving, and stunning throughout.

Who could reasonably ask for more in a movie? A 10/10 rating from me.

I say action, but actor Milo Twomey as Mr Condomine chooses to deliver his lines like a sergeant major – arms by his sides and rooted to the spot most of the time. On the other hand, the maid’s part was over-acted to the point of annoyance. Annette Badland as eccentric medium Madame Arcati shows how it should be done, although her diction was a little indistinct towards the end – a fault which fellow Coronation Street actor Suranne Jones displayed from time to time as Mrs Condomine.

One turkey to avoid this Christmas.

Today I went on a Technical Tour of that same aeroplane which, after five years standing out in the open, is now housed in the Concorde Centre. (Whilst this purpose built hangar protects the iconic plane from the wind and rain, it is unheated. The seven of us on our tour were bitterly cold for most of the 90 minute experience. If you are considering a tour, wait until spring!)

Our guide was enthusiastic and fluent, with a great deal of detailed knowledge which he seemed to take pleasure in sharing with us. He walked our small group slowly underneath the fuselage from tip to tail, explaining what each protruding sensor did, and describing the many design challenges which are unique to a supersonic passenger aircraft.

Compared with everyday airliners of course, Concorde is petite – it carried only 100 passengers. What I found surprising was that the four powerful Olympus engines which could propel her to 2,395 kph were also very small.

Our guide explained why the engine housings are rectangular, not round (because there have to be adjustable baffles in front of the intakes to reduce the velocity of air rushing into the engine). He also explained why the undercarriage is so tall compared with subsonic passenger aircraft (because Concorde took off and landed at an angle of some 13° compared with about 3° and so a stilt-like undercarriage was necessary to provide the necessary ground clearance at the tail).

The shape of the wings is a beautiful curve, with an almost imperceptible upward ‘flick’ of the outer trailing edge. This made it possible to fly at low speeds with wings designed to fly at twice the speed of sound.

Inside, we sat in comfortable leather seats with generous legroom. There was no provision for in-flight TV, and the overhead lockers are very shallow, with room for perhaps a briefcase or handbag each. The windows too are tiny, but it didn’t feel claustrophobic.

The washrooms were similar to those on everyday airliners, but the galleys were remarkably small. It must have been quite a challenge to serve 100 five-course haute cuisine meals on china plates from ovens the size of a child’s wardrobe.

Two-by-two we went forward to the flight deck and were invited to sit in the captain’s seat. Our guide explained all the displays and controls available to the crew – including the flight engineer who had his own wall of instruments to monitor. It was a cramped, austere environment with quite a restricted view through the visor.

Concorde is a magnificent technical achievement and beautiful too – a marvel which for 35 years could fly non-stop across the Atlantic faster than a rifle bullet. It is a shame that for financial reasons it was not possible to keep one or two in an airworthy condition for air shows and exhibitions.

It’s the same with Lone Scherfig’s An Education except it comes with its own built-in annoying, insistent wee waah: ‘She’s too old for the part … She’s too old for the part … She’s too old for the part …’

Carey Mulligan is seven years older than her character. Now, seven years might be close enough not to matter when playing a mature adult, but Jenny is supposed to be 16. And Mulligan is just not a convincing teenage schoolgirl.

There are many other irritations besides this mis-casting. Peter Sarsgaard plays David. He’s supposed to be a suave, manipulative older man. Trouble is, there’s no grit, no edge, no menace. David and Jenny just moon at each other like they are the same age, and such is the softness of his demeanour, it is hard to accept that this man is a self-serving immoral (heterosexual) hedonist.

The period detailing is good (the film is set in the early 1960′s) but it is too flat, lacking depth and dramatic involvement, and is over-long.

So I went to see Fantastic Mr. Fox tonight partly on the strength of that experience, and partly because it features so many A-list voiceovers.

The trouble is, I had forgotten that great Hollywood screen stars don’t necessarily add much to an animation simply by reading the dialogue. I suspect directors and producers know that too, but at the same time they know big names do persuade punters like me to part with cash at the box office.

This animation falls between many stools. Think quaint old-fashioned stop-motion in the style of, say, Corpse Bride but not as engagingly quirky or inventive. Or anthropomorphic fantasy which lacks the wit of, say, Wallace & Gromit films. (A comparison which is positively invited by the lifting of the motorbike and sidecar idea from Wallace and Gromit in A Close Shave.

Will it appeal to kids who are used to mind-boggling CGI? I doubt it. What about adults? Judging by the virtually empty cinema this evening, the answer has to be ‘No’.