Reviews

Debut album follows a trio of superb seven-inch singles

Generic horror film, scored by Nathan Barr with contributions from the man who ups the eerie ante for David Lynch Angelo Badalamenti. Also has spooky-in-context songs from The Turtlenecks and Your Mom. Deliberately nerve-jangling: when I wanted to take it off, I couldn't. Most entertaining are Barr's sleevenotes: "After the score was completed I checked myself into the local psychiatric facility for various tests and shock therapy. They released me after a month with an electronic monitoring bracelet.

Long-serving English roots band unmasked

French duo return to form on third album proper

Two-CD compilation full of little wonders

DIRECTED BY Edward Zwick STARRING Tom Cruise, Ken Watanabe, Hiroyuki Sanada, Timothy Spall Opens January 9, Cert 15, 154 mins Very loosely based on the development of trade links between the US and Japan in the 1870s, signalling the end of Shogunate rule and the beginning of Japan's Meiji Restoration era, The Last Samurai details the exploits of fictional cavalry hero Captain Nathan Algren (Cruise). Dispirited by the violence he's inflicted on the Indian nation, Algren accepts a lucrative assignment to train Japanese riflemen.

To say this ultraviolent 1983 flick is Chuck Norris'best movie might smack of faint praise, but what's good is mostly down to David Carradine as his strutting, butt-kicking, cigar-sucking nemesis. It's a modern-day western, heavy on the spaghetti, with Norris'Texas ranger taking on Carradine's gun-runner and his army of disposable borderland Mexicans. Did Walter Hill watch this before making Extreme Prejudice?

A kind of Australian answer to Lock, Stock...without the masturbatory middle-class fascination with lowlife machismo, David Caesar's exuberant yarn about slot machine wars in 1960s Sydney is a riot of garish hues and lurid trouser suits. Toni Collette rises above a routine plot and meaty cast (Bryan Brown, Sam Neill) with her sassy gangster's moll routine.

Twentieth anniversary celebration by universally popular jazz trio

This is cooler than cool. Probably a guilty pleasure, as the movie appears to be a thinly-veiled remake of Flashdance starring Jessica Alba, but it swings like a narcissistic cat. Missy Elliott (who cameos in the film) lures us in with "Hurt Sumthin", and it just gets better from there. Tweet's "Thugman" is delicious, Nate Dogg's "Leave Her Alone" is beat-perfect, and Erick Sermon and Redman's "React" causes you to do just that.