Reviews

Big Star man's missing 70s years

Career anthology that runs out of steam halfway through

Sixth terrific solo album from hedonistic, nihilistic Seattle survivor

In the mid-'80s Alex Cox, having made Repo Man and Sid & Nancy to some acclaim, was deemed a financially viable punk auteur. This changed after Straight To Hell, his surreal anti-comedy-cum-spaghetti-western, which had a peculiar genesis. Cox had booked a bunch of less than abstemious musicians for a Solidarity Tour of Nicaragua.

Latest instalment in one man's crusade to keep the spirit of the '60s alive

Third album proper from ex-Boo Radley Martin Carr

DIRECTED BY Richard Linklater STARRING Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy Opens July 30, Cert 15, 80 mins Released in 1995, Richard Linklater's Eurodrama Before Sunrise was a charming holiday romance, a post-grunge Brief Encounter. Reuniting the same actors/characters nine years on, this sequel feels more like a Lost In Translation for the Middle Youth generation, with the same tone but higher emotional stakes.

Likeable Moroccan comedy-drama

Robert Aldrich's most profitable movie presents war as mean-spirited farce: Major Lee Marvin offers a bunch of jailed WWII Gls—including John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson and Donald Sutherland—the chance to join him on a suicide mission into Occupied France. The movie wastes its greatest actor, Robert Ryan, but it's a relentless work—violent, funny and deeply cynical.

Startling documentary about an American family torn apart by sexual scandal