Reviews

Timely portrait of a Haitian human rights activist

Cynical lapsed communist Daniel Auteuil gets lost driving through a dark forest, and encounters haughty bilingual seductress Kristin Scott Thomas. An episodic shaggy dog story ensues, sprayed with romance and bleak jokes. Pascal Bonitzer writes/directs a unique, odd mystery which is splendidly acted by all. Let's face it, if you're casting a haughty bilingual seductress, Kristin's your woman.

Just when you thought that Pixar had colonised the universe of Western kids' imaginations, here came something fabulously rich and strange from the East. Spirited Away is an apt title for an animation classic that literally transports the viewer into a parallel visual world of gods and magic. Whether it's an allegory of greed and innocence or merely a psychedelic feast, this implicitly anti-Disney epic is never cosy or sanitised. And its decorative detail is breathtaking.

Subtle seafaring actioner set during the Napoleonic wars

Third fantastic album by the Swiss glitch situationists

Athens, GA septet deliver eloquently dreamscaped stopgap LP

Welsh neo-psych gang's most recent album gets the remix treatment

Essentially a Transatlantic label sampler of folksy recordings from the '60s and '70s

Smarter-than-it-looks biker flick

Filmed in '76, the conclusion to Roman Polanski's evil-rooms trilogy returns to the urban paranoia and fracturing psyches of Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. Polanski—who'd just taken up residence in France—himself plays the vulnerable, mouse-like new occupant of a forlorn Paris apartment, whose creeping schizophrenia grows as he feels himself falling under the influence of the previous resident, a female suicide victim. A perverse slow-dazzle.