Reviews

Another reworking of the Betty Blue mythology, with the always watchable Valeria Golino as the Sicilian free spirit who is deemed nuts by her husband and run out of town for such sins as spontaneity and unconventionality. Sun-baked scenery and a lurch into magical realism at the end makes it more than the sum of its parts.

Up there with Citizen Kane as a standard bearer for the medium, and still utterly compulsive. FW Murnau's first US movie, dating from 1927, deploys a battery of impressive camera techniques in telling the story of a steadfast family man seduced by Margaret Livingston's femme fatale.

With a new LP imminent, the Minnesota-based folk-country boy reissues albums two and three

The American underground is currently full of unashamedly cosmic bands, like Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Tower Recordings, who mix folk and psychedelia with an unusually fluent understanding of improvised music. Unfortunately, most of their records are difficult to track down, as they're only released in tiny, elaborately packaged quantities. Thanks to Kranky, then, for reissuing Unknown Spin, previously a limited run of 300 CD-Rs. Charalambides are a Texan trio specialising in a kind of desert drone constructed from guitar, wordless female harmonies and spectral pedal-steel.

Eclectic Prefuse 73 man turns his hand to Latin ballads

Last year, in a fatally altruistic gesture, Japanese technocrat Cornelius invited visitors to his website to remix tracks from his excellent 2002 album, Point. PM (it stands for Point Mixes) purportedly compiles the best 12 from around 400 of those submitted, with largely dispiriting results. If Cornelius set out to showcase how the meticulous pastoral textures of Point could be desecrated, then PM is a triumph of sorts: only Masakatsu Inoue's "Pointer Remix", a beautiful hybrid of musique concrète and prickly ambience, really does the source material justice.

Magnificent six-CD compilation of gospel roots

Slow-burning critique of modern China's crisis

Standout supernatural action movie from 1987. The tale of a poor young scholar who falls in love with a ghostly princess, it involves a journey to the underworld, a battle with a mile-long tongue, sword fights, songs, slapstick and some real shocks. Despite its evident lack of a budget, it's magical, mildly erotic and only marginally insane.

Roberto Rossellini's small-scale but infinitely moving 1953 masterwork plucks two stars from Hollywood—Rossellini's wife Ingrid Bergman and the magnificent George Sanders—and smashes them down on the road as a crisis-hit couple coming apart during a trip in Italy. Rossellini gave his actors the bare bones of a situation, then left them to improvise; they stumble beautifully, trying to discover their own story. The random feel anticipates the French new wave.