Reviews

Tift Merritt – Tambourine

North Carolina songstress' second LP

N. Lannon – Chemical Friends

San Franciscan weds sombre songcraft to grooves and glitches

Embrace – Out Of Nothing

Long-lost Yorkshiremen's rousing return

Open Water

Tense yuppies-as-shark-bait splasher movie

Track Record

Riding that train, high on cocaine...Janis and Jerry in 1970

Luis Buñuel Box Set

Three of Buñuel's berserk best, ridiculing bourgeois values and 'normal' sexuality. Diary Of A Chambermaid (1964) sees Jeanne Moreau as the social climber playing on the fantasies of the affluent. The Milky Way (1970) follows two tramps on a pilgrimage who encounter loopy heretics and priests. Belle De Jour (1967), with Catherine Denëuve, is, of course, the strangest, most haunting erotica of its age.

Killing Zoe

After falling out with Tarantino over the credits for Pulp Fiction, Roger Avary made this violent Paris-set heist movie in a bid to establish his creative autonomy. It was hammered by critics, who dubbed it "Reservoir Frogs" and dismissed Avary as derivative. Zoe's better than its reputation suggests, though, and has the added pleasure of Jean-Hugues Anglade going spectacularly bonkers as a smack-shooting gang leader.

1984

With grim, grubby retro-future styling, Michael Radford's movie, originally released in the eponymous year, is the best adaptation of George Orwell's feel-bad totalitarian parable. As reluctant rebel Winston Smith, John Hurt is perfect—looks like he's spent his life in misery. The revelation is Richard Burton, weighed down with strange love, melancholy and menace in his final role as O'Brien, the investigator who takes Hurt under his wing to crush him.

Hollywood Rose – The Roots Of Guns N’Roses

Unremarkable dregs from the 1980s metal vaults

The Byrds – The Essential Byrds

Does exactly what it says on the tin
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