Reviews

Post-rockers' fifth album, and first since 2000. Lovely cover, shame about the music

This belated sequel to 2002's triple-album retrospective Love God Murder features 18 songs that might easily have fitted under one or another of that set's individual headings. Not, perhaps, "Murder"—the only death here is that of the Native American hero of Peter LaFarge's "Ballad Of Ira Hayes", a war hero allowed to fall into alcoholism and ignominy after he'd helped raise that iconic flag at Iwo Jima—but certainly "Love" and "God".

Stiller and Aniston star in rib-cracking romantic farce

When discussing Kevin Smith's oeuvre, most dismiss this '95 nugget as the dip between Clerks and Dogma. A mistake: as two slackers, Jason Lee and Jeremy London, hang around the mall doing nothing, plenty happens—comic-book iconography, smut, inventive swearing, Shannen Doherty pretty much playing her loveable hell-bitch self, and Ben Affleck marginalised. A buzzy, cynical, romp.

Beautifully gauged 1989 romantic comedy from the undervalued Steve Kloves, with Jeff and Beau Bridges glorious as two competitive but complementary brothers who constitute a lounge act. When they employ Michelle Pfeiffer's seductive Susie Diamond as chanteuse, Jeff's hard-boiled heart goes whoopee. Oscar-nominated Pfeiffer, cleverly, sings well but not too well. Lovely.

Straining to balance bog-standard biopic with anarchic art expression, Julie Taymor's biopic of Frida Kahlo is crammed with exquisite cinematic diversions (dream sequences, hallucinations, animated Kahlo paintings) while simultaneously stultified by the need to plod through Kahlo's life with startling apathy. Wild teen, bus crash, crippled, Diego Rivera, lots of sex, arguments, affair with Trotsky, big show in Mexico, the end.

For years, it was believed that no footage survived of the pioneering American Folk Blues Festival tours of Europe in the early '60s. Now a vast cache of performances has miraculously turned up by the likes of John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. Magic moments, every one.

Mini album of Canadian radio sessions from the gay gospel Belle & Sebastian. Sort of

Second album from adopted Manc chest-beaters

Second compilation gleaned from the cupboards of erstwhile Beta Band man and current member of Fife's oddball Fence Collective