Reviews

In tandem with her recent, more rock-oriented collaborative albums (corralling everyone from Damon Albarn and Jarvis Cocker to Billy Corgan), Faithfull has pursued her other career as a torch singer, the regal ruin of her pristine '60s folk voice now the perfect expression of seen-it-all wisdom/ennui. In the company of pianist Paul Trueblood and at the end of a world tour (recorded at the International Jazz Festival in '97), she's bawdy, wry and always wrenchingly expressive: in short, quite the best exponent of this sort of thing.

Outstanding neo-classicism from German composer/pianist

That's as in Robert, the devil, and a hellhound, too...

Belated arrival of American indie duo's second album

Second from Athens, Georgia quartet led by R.E.M. remixer/Bright Eyes engineer Andy LeMaster

Doomed US troubadour with the gentle touch

Ex-wrestler does well in formulaic action movie

In Wolfgang Becker's entirely beguiling movie, a young East German goes to extraordinary lengths to convince his mother the world hasn't changed while she's been in a coma—which means somehow covering up the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism. A beautifully realised humanistic comedy.

It all feels as dynamic and mould-breaking as it did 10 years ago. ER has kept itself fresh with regular transfusions of new characters, but it's amazing how good the original cast was (take a bow Noah Wyle, Sherry Stringfield; Anthony Edwards and that Clooney guy). And we forget how radical ER's multiple-stories-on-the-fly technique was, using long, fluent steadicam shots to give shape to a maze of powerful interlocking narratives. Holby City, get stuffed.

Eric Rohmer's 1981 movie stars Béatrice Romand as Sabine, a twentysomething Parisienne who, fleeing an unhappy affair, resolves to find and wed Mr Right. Meeting Edmond, a young lawyer, she promptly decides she's got her man, and is soon obsessed with the idea of their getting married—little realising that Edmond fails to second that emotion. Meticulously assembled and exquisitely performed, it's a tart, gently mocking but poignant parable.