Reviews

Everyone's favourite investigative smoothie Nick Broomfield updates his 1991 doc Selling Of A Serial Killer by re-cataloguing the tragic, shambolic life of Aileen Wuornos (from homeless woodswoman to vagrant prostitute to multiple murderer) and finally interviewing a clearly demented Wuornos only hours before her execution. More sombre than the usual Broomfield outings, but effective all the same.

Listen to Kate Rusby's records and her brand of folk revivalism suggests a rather serious and high-minded young woman. Yet in concert she's a revelation, interspersing sublime versions of traditional folk ballads with rambling but engaging introductions full of homely Yorkshire warmth and wit. Rusby makes folk music seem like fun again, and the feeling never flags throughout this 90-minute set.

If 2002's wonderful Lost In Revelry was Blonde On Blonde rescrambled by Westerberg and barbed by Costello, the more buoyant Fortune thrashes to the classic American assembly-line rock of Springsteen and the choppy pop of early Nick Lowe/Joe Jackson.

The mighty Nyman's 60th birthday has been marked by six remastered re-releases. One, Decay Music, was produced by Brian Eno in 1976 and has never been available on CD before. Eno's written sleevenotes. It was one of the first significant contributions to 'minimalism', a word which Nyman, writing in The Spectator in the late '60s, was the first to apply to music. After mastering this means of expression, Nyman decided: "I don't believe that the best film scores are the ones you don't notice. I refuse to provide just background.

Demos for Fay's eponymous 1970 Decca LP and rarely-heard late-'60s outtakes

London muso's rise from mod-bod to jazz-head across two CDs

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!"