Reviews

Utterly predictable slapstick-laden festive fare as Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) prepares to spend an old-fashioned non-stop domestic disaster of a Christmas with his extended family (including Randy Quaid and an extremely young Juliette Lewis). If you'd like to see Mr Chase being hit repeatedly over the head, this could be the movie for you.

From 1992, good guy Brad Pitt and bad guy Gabriel Byrne are transported to another dimension (which just happens to be a Ralph Bakshi cartoon) where they vie for the affections of an animated version of Kim Basinger. It's Roger Rabbit without the jokes: dumb, dull, dire, and a criminal waste of money.

William Friedkin's original was dazzling, intelligent and scary; John Boorman's train wreck of a sequel is none of the above. Richard Burton is at his hammiest as the priest investigating the death of Father Merrin at the end of the first movie, Louise Fletcher plays Regan's psychiatrist, and the screenplay is one of the worst ever committed to paper. Avoid.

Sonic Boom, once of Spacemen 3, reworks Welsh experimentalist Dafydd Morgan

Stephin Merritt, whose piquant playfulness with The Magnetic Fields has seen him described as this generation's Cole Porter or Irving Berlin, may not be quite ready for that league—not just yet. But his sanguine voice, shrewd words and mauve melodies do mark him out as a songwriter of genuine, um, merit. Here he colours Peter Hedges' new film with five new songs and five drawn from his albums with the Fields and The 6ths. There are clever couplets and wry winks, but the melancholy is authentic.

Uneasy listening by out-spoken wordstress

Influential pre-grunge landmark re-emerges after years in limbo

Expert Appalachian pickers on fire in '74

Bleak British comedy from Dogme defectors is brave and affecting

Renny Harlin's 1995 bomb comes midway, both chronologically and qualitatively, between Roman Polanski's fascinatingly bad Pirates (1986) and this year's Pirates Of The Caribbean (reviewed on p141). Whether casting Geena Davis as the head swashbuckler on this treasure hunt was post-feminist revisionism or sheer vanity (she's Harlin's wife) is for you to decide. Either way, it doesn't work. Looks nice, though, in a theme park way.