Reviews

Denys Arcand reunites the Quebecois characters who made '86's The Decline Of The American Empire so witty and engaging, and despite their age, disillusion and failing health, they're as intellectually provocative as before. Yes, it's talky, but as one lies dying, his friends reminisce about days of drugs and libido, and his son finds a backbone. A moving, note-perfect Oscar-winner.

Don Letts soundtrack to early-'80s NYC

Best-of compendium from mid-'90s indie should-have-beens

Given the unfolding and increasingly tragic saga of The Libertines, it's a miracle this record even exists, let alone has any artistic worth. For, in the two years since their extraordinary debut album (2002's Up The Bracket), the story of this erratic but enthralling group has taken in serious drug addiction, a prison sentence and—during the making of this record alone—three failed attempts to get frontman Pete Doherty through rehab. Indeed, on the eve of release, Doherty has temporarily been removed from the Libertines line-up. The second Libertines album is all about this.

Superb debut from string-laden troubadour

Britpop nearly-man gets pastoral

Ravishing pop debut from Malmo four-piece

Second helping of web-slinging superhero mayhem beats all comers

When it was released in his native Hong Kong in August 1990, John Woo's brutal Vietnam-era epic Bullet In The Head was a box office disaster. Speaking to Uncut in April 2003, Woo remembered: "When we did the premiere, people just walked out...I felt totally exiled." Coming just over a year after the brutal massacre of students in Tiananmen Square, it's perhaps no surprise that the movie—called Die xue jie tou in Woo's native Cantonese, aka Bloodshed In The Streets—was too complicated, too downbeat, too pessimistic. And it is.

Gus Van Sant's Palme d'Or-winning take on the Columbine massacre makes for understandably difficult viewing. Van Sant deliberately shoots the movie flat and spare, looping the story, Rashômon-style, through numerous viewpoints. The Groundhog Day tedium of school life and the blank-eyed stares of the killers are chilling.