Reviews

It's not an exhilarating concert. Even "The Boys Are Back In Town", "Jailbreak", "Waiting For An Alibi" and "Don't Believe A Word" lack lustre, as do Phil Lynott's eyes and the dynamics of the band. The audience is polite, excepting the odd permed headbanger. Uninspiring.

Four under-21s from Tyne & Wear with a sharply cut punk debut

A fetish nurse cover shot that could've been lifted from a Jim Thompson paperback. A regular flicker between white noise and mellow, Jefferson Airplane circa Volunteers melody... It could only be the return of Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley and their incumbent guru Jim O'Rourke. Having squared up as aggravating aural elders, the Youth sound rejuvenated as they alternate between Stoogey metal rattlers like "Pattern Recognition" or the fetish-laden "Dripping Dream" and irate hippie singalongs.

The Texan troubadour tackles the Big Questions

Two-CD compilation of Doug Sahm's pioneering Texan outfit

Compilation of wistful folk delights

The director of Get Carter gets back with the British mobsters

Written as a student project with future Alien writer Dan O'Bannon, John Carpenter's ingenious no-budget directorial debut, named after a Grateful Dead song was the first stoner sci-fi pic. On a scuzzy spaceship far away, four furry freak surf dude astronauts are bored out of their skulls on a long-haul mission to destroy unstable planets, and plagued by troubles when their talking bomb gets ideas of its own and the alien "pet" O'Bannon has smuggled aboard escapes. Sideswipes at Kubrick's 2001 are entirely intentional; the attack of the munchies the movie brings on pure coincidence.

Fritz Lang's seminal 1922 thriller unleashed cinema's first modern criminal, Mabuse, a shadowy underworld figure with a thousand faces. Combining technological genius with an almost occult ability to terrify, Lang's Mabuse is a sinister, manipulative mastermind. The 1933 sequel, The Testament Of Dr Mabuse, is even better, with Mabuse as a demonic Hitler figure. Everything from Bond to Blue Velvet starts here.

In its 1946, Hays Code day, this adaptation of James M Cain's novel was provocative and erotic, although it was later out-raunched by the '81 Jack'n'Jessica version. This drips with textbook noir, and echoes Double Indemnity in both story and style. Femme fatale prototype Lana Turner tempts John Garfield to off her husband, but their comeuppance is inevitable. "He had to have her love—if he hung for it!"