Reviews

It’s All About Love – First Name

Zbigniew Preisner (there's one for the Scrabble match) is Poland's film music god, having scored Kieslowski's Three Colours and Dekalog. His work here for the overblown, befuddled Thomas Vinterberg turkey is tastefully shimmery, and strident only when necessary. Perhaps he could lease it out to an infinitely superior movie, which shouldn't be hard to find. Among Vinterberg's hilarious sleevenotes is a ludicrous boast: "It's all in the film... including an excellent song I wrote. It is in Latin, and just as there are seven days, there are seven words in the song.

Ray Charles – Genius Loves Company

Genius signs off with his first duets album alongside Elton, Norah Jones et al

Radio 4 – Stealing Of A Nation

Long Island punk-funk revivalists'third LP

Ronny Elliott – Hep

Florida's rock'n'roll Zelig steps out of the shadows

Mats Gustafsson – Sonic Youth With Friends

NY free-rockers in Scandi scream-up

A Mann For All Seasons

From the director who brought you Heat, a sleek LA thriller on Cruise control

The Alamo

Revisionist remake of classic Duke western

Mac Nuggets

Uncut recounted the tale of Fleetwood Mac's improbable reunion at length in May last year (Take 72). Now come two DVD releases commemorating the resumption of rock'n'roll's longest-running soap opera. Live In Boston is a straightforward concert film shot in September 2003 on their first tour in five years. The band clearly miss Christine McVie, the only member of the classic mid-'70s line-up not to participate, and on one level, they offer up stadium rock of the blandest kind.

Django

RELEASED A YEAR after Sergio Leone created the genre with A Fistful Of Dollars (1965), Django, directed by Leone's onetime assistant Sergio Corbucci, was the movie that saw the spaghetti western explode; a fact borne out by the countless unauthorised sequels it spawned across Europe and beyond (as far as Jamaica, where Perry Henzell's 1973 Rude Boy classic The Harder They Come paid heavy homage). Blue-eyed Franco Nero plays the eponymous mystery gunslinger, wandering in from the filthy wilderness, dragging a coffin behind him, toward a Hellish-looking bordertown.

Daryl Hall & John Oates

The Philly kings of blue-eyed soul attain megastardom
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