Reviews

Sydney's finest reunited

Another lengthy hiatus, another Blue Nile album. Here Paul Buchanan revisits the same spot on the hillside overlooking the evening city lights, is still filled with the same surging, oblique melancholy and longing that has sustained The Blue Nile since 1984, is still crafting singularly mature MOR in a darker shade of turquoise all his own. This time, however, the overall return feels diminished in effect—"I Would Never", for instance, trespasses dangerously close to U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For".

The latest French provocation

All-star cast fails to save plodding kidnap 'drama'

Director Emir Kusturica assembled Johnny Depp, Jerry Lewis, Faye Dunaway, Lili Taylor and Vincent Gallo in the desert and waited for inspiration. Quite what he was on can only be imagined. The movie has its ups and downs, but does boast two prime pieces of Gallo-ana: a reenactment of Cary Grant's escape from a cropduster, and a classic set-to between De Niro and Pesci with Vinnie playing both parts. Mad.

Elmore Leonard's first modern fiction novel was originally filmed in 1969 with Ryan O'Neal in the starring role. It flopped. This remake (directed by Miami Blues' George Armitage) fares no better; it drifts aimlessly, while Owen Wilson's small-time crook, drawn into a relationship with the thrill-seeking girl of a local property developer, never engages your feelings. Morgan Freeman, Charlie Sheen and Vinnie Jones co-star.

Sam Fuller once claimed that the point of any opening sequence was to give the viewer an erection. Here we have Barbara Stanwyck in black, on a white stallion at the head of her 40 hired men. As lawman Barry Sullivan exclaims succinctly: "Whoa!" Shot in 11 days, in Cinemascope, this is Fuller firing on all cylinders, taking the '50s pulp western and squeezing more juice out of it than any of his contemporaries.

Mid-price reissues from one of the progenitors of intelligent rap

Cult horror movie-inspired synth-pop

Near-fatal 1958 car crash fails to prevent career resurrection