Reviews

The Damned were always a proficient and exciting live band, and they still are. However, their air of danger disappeared with Rat Scabies, and it's disturbing to find a keyboard-playing goon with a perm and a drummer in a gorilla costume compounding Sensible's permissible buffoonery.

Red House Painters mainman returns, a little better adjusted

Classy follow-up to multi-platinum Come Away With Me from new Bonnie Raitt

Hugely promising new find

Peter Buck-approved East Coast Paisley Underground curio

You ain't heard nothing 'til you check out crazy Canuck Randy Bachman

Overlooked cuts from pop-country gal with the "itty-bitty voice"

Director Tim Burton's father-son fable is his best movie yet

Another reworking of the Betty Blue mythology, with the always watchable Valeria Golino as the Sicilian free spirit who is deemed nuts by her husband and run out of town for such sins as spontaneity and unconventionality. Sun-baked scenery and a lurch into magical realism at the end makes it more than the sum of its parts.

Up there with Citizen Kane as a standard bearer for the medium, and still utterly compulsive. FW Murnau's first US movie, dating from 1927, deploys a battery of impressive camera techniques in telling the story of a steadfast family man seduced by Margaret Livingston's femme fatale.