Reviews

Mike Figgis' brilliant experiment spawned many imitations, some by him, none as good. Against a quartered screen, four cameras show—in real time—a multi-strand narrative, played out among Tinseltown wannabes and has-beens. There's sex, murder, moral vacuums and a huge cast including Stellan Skarsgård and Saffron Burrows. Figgis' own music ices the cake. Genius.

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

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.

Tom DiCillo's offbeat comedy is a blend of cop thriller and romance which may confuse the uninitiated, but diehards will lap up his calmly twisted humour. Denis Leary's an NY cop with backache, recently widowed, who's lousy on the job till chiropractor Liz Hurley shows him love and partner Steve Buscemi questions his sexuality. Factor in many cinephile in-jokes and it's an intelligent, cynical joy.