CDs/DVDs
Jasper Rees
This was all set to be released in UK cinemas around about now, but at the last minute it has gone straight to DVD. Perhaps the distributors got nervous. You can imagine why. Kim Cattrall is a totem for all sophisticated, sexually expressive women of a certain age. She’s ultimately the reason Sex and the City was what it was. You can put gratuitous violence, killing, maiming and all manner of cheap moronic sleaze up on a big screen and rake in the moolah. But some things are just too much. Samantha as a former Eighties porn starlet, washed up, penniless and living in a trailer? That Read more ...
David Nice
Your Macbeth opens in the round, tailored to a small studio theatre. In entrusting it to television, do you engage someone experienced in the medium to render faithfully the spaces and the talking heads, as Trevor Nunn did for the deservedly legendary McKellen-Dench double act? Or do you cry your own havoc and let slip the dogs of all your favourite film directors, as happens in Rupert Goold’s ambitious TV transfer?Either could work. But the only proof is in the end result. And while the 1970s film still chills my blood, I can’t help feeling that here so much tension and imagination flails Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gothenburg electro-moodists Little Dragon aren’t short of high-profile cheerleaders. All four members appeared on a couple of tracks on Gorillaz' Plastic Beach, and the band supported Damon Albarn's gang on the subsequent tour. TV on the Radio’s David Sitek borrowed their singer Yukimi Nagano for his solo album, also from last year. Ritual Union, their third album, escapes from the shadows cast by the collaborations to reassert that this is a band, rather than a box of sticking plasters for other people’s careers.The collaborations – Big Boi has also co-opted them and Nagano appears on Rafael Read more ...
howard.male
Most of the arrangements on this collection of covers of Eighties and early-Nineties UK soul tunes actually have more of a mid-Seventies live band feel to them. This proves to be an excellent way of rescuing the material from the often stultifying effect of programmed drums and cheesy keyboards which has rendered so much music from this period unlistenable to. Largely the approach works very well, although on one or two tracks the end result doesn’t quite measure up to its template.For example, “Apparently Nothing” by the Young Disciples still sounds cooler and more edgily contemporary in its Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There are many ways to get to the truth. One of the best ways is to ignore the truth. That seems to be the mantra of Ken Russell's colourfully mendacious portrait of the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers, receiving its long-awaited DVD release. The script (by a young Melvyn Bragg) is breathless and ludicrous and yields too swiftly and too often to the hysterical - to carpet-clawing madness, glass-smashing fury and shirt-tearing lust - as it follows an improbably manic and louche Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) and his struggles to juggle the obsessive love of the women and Read more ...
matilda.battersby
It has been eight years since Gillian Welch last released an album and her loyal fans – not to mention critics - have been waiting with bated breath. Will she have spent the years honing the delicious Americana and Appalachian-influenced folk that once set her and musical partner David Rawlings apart? Or will she have kept the hit-and-miss drums, the electric guitar and the chirpier outlook of her last album Soul Journey? Thankfully, the answer is the former: The Harrow and the Harvest might well be her best record yet.Welch and Rawlings have pared down their sound to produce a purity of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Well, there's a nice surprise. Jill Scott was feared lost to music industry machinations, more likely to succeed in her acting career than make a fourth album (she's probably best known now to mainstream British audiences as Mma Ramotswe in The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency TV series). But it seems a four-year musical hiatus and change of label has done her the power of good, as this is the Philadelphia singer and spoken-word artist's best album since her debut Who is Jill Scott?It kicks off in fairly straightforward “nu soul” fashion, with “Blessed”, featuring the kind of I'm-a-strong-woman- Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Beyoncé took a break to recharge her funk batteries after the lacklustre I Am... Sasha Fierce, and there is much riding on this new album. The Amazonian soulstress had 72 songs to choose from, so it is no surprise that 4 is eclectic. What is surprising is that it starts with two pedestrian power ballads. "1 + 1" and "I Care" find Mrs Jay-Z in R'n'B classicist mode, all dull I-will-survive lyrics and dynamic lungs. Next up "I Miss You" is a little better, with its blips and bleeps flying the flag for electronica.Then things get more interesting, thanks to a colourful range of influences and Read more ...
fisun.guner
Is Don’t Look Now really the best British film of all time? That’s how a panel of 150 industry experts voted earlier this year in a poll compiled by Time Out. But then, out of a list of 100 top British movies, Distant Voices, Still Lives came third, ahead of Brief Encounter (12) or anything by Hitchcock.Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 supernatural chiller no longer shocks with its infamous scene of explicit sex; and the scenes featuring the two spooky sisters remind us that Roeg’s interest in cinematography and clever editing seems often to outweigh his interest in getting the best out of his actors. But Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mehdi Zannad isn’t a familiar name, but he’s issued a raft of albums as Fugu and has been championed by Stereolab. His profile in Japan is good, and he’s composed soundtracks in his native France. Fugue, the first album released under his own name, is co-produced by Tahiti 80’s Xavier Boyer. "Fugue" translates as "break away" – which he has from the Fugu guise. He’s also broken away from English. Fugue is Zannad's first French-language album. Language, though, is no barrier to basking in this summery pop.Zannad was inspired to sing in French after working on the film La France in 2007. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's been a decade since Stevie Nicks's last album of new songs, Trouble in Shangri-La, but In Your Dreams proves that there's creative life in the old girl yet. Fans of the wispy tunestrel will be pleased to hear that she hasn't strayed far from her familiar stomping grounds of melodious folk-rockism and tales of love and yearning, the focus (in fine Seventies style) fixing on the singer's emotional trials and torments. The voice that sang "Rhiannon" remains suitably ghostly, and even with an overlay of mild croakiness, it sounds pretty good for a 63-year-old.The disc is crammed with a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s an accepted flouting of reality that in films “based on a true story”, the first betrayal of the truth is in the casting. The reveal over the closing credits of The Fighter tells you just how well its two main characters have done out of Hollywood. For the preceding two hours these rough-edged veterans of the boxing ring have morphed into Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale. Whatever else is a riff on reality in this thrilling addition to the canon of fight movies is mostly a matter for the extras. But to recreate the bruising lives of a struggling boxer and his smack-addicted half- Read more ...