Reviews

Lincoln begins with the Battle of Jenkin’s Ferry in Arkansas in April, 1864, at the height of the American Civil War. It is a messy, close-quarter scrap in the mud between black and Confederate soldiers, with men shooting, stabbing, punching, flailing and gouging at each other. The rest of Spielberg’s film is about conflict, too, but of a less visceral kind: the constitutional battles Lincoln faces on screen, and the tussle off-camera between Spielberg’s ropey tendencies to mythologise and Tony Kushner’s scrupulous screenplay that strives for fact and precision.

Vocal collaboration draws ancient and modern together...

Soulful debut is stunning introduction to producer's talents...

Zero Dark Thirty is a companion piece to The Hurt Locker, the previous film from director Kathryn Bigelow and scriptwriter Mark Boal. But while The Hurt Locker viewed the War on Terror in microcosm, focussing on a three-man bomb disposal team during the Iraq war, Zero Dark Thirty tells a bigger story: the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, unfolding across a ten-year period in CIA Black Ops sites, military bases and embassies in destinations as far a field as Pakistan, Gdansk, London and the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

An alternative history of the post-rock pioneers...

Kubrick's first film - a low budget treatise on war that compliments his later triumphs...

New Orleans soul prince revisits his doo-wop youth. Keith Richards and Don Was co-produce...

33 and a third-year anniversary edition of the cathartic classic...

The psychedelic warlords' live masterpiece reissued...

Here’s no mud in your ear! The Johnny Thunders gang’s epochal 1977 album restored (yet again), with demos, alternative mixes... and badges!