Reviews

Three lessons in future-beat history

Bleak British comedy from Dogme defectors is brave and affecting

Renny Harlin's 1995 bomb comes midway, both chronologically and qualitatively, between Roman Polanski's fascinatingly bad Pirates (1986) and this year's Pirates Of The Caribbean (reviewed on p141). Whether casting Geena Davis as the head swashbuckler on this treasure hunt was post-feminist revisionism or sheer vanity (she's Harlin's wife) is for you to decide. Either way, it doesn't work. Looks nice, though, in a theme park way.

A patchy Italian crime thriller, the only fresh 'angle'being that the drug dealer working for the Mafia is a woman (she hides the goods in shoe boxes). Roberta Torre's direction lacks vim, but Donatella Finocchiaro is vividly compelling as the titular anti-heroine—alternately nervy and swaggering, torn between love and duty, craving affection but ultimately hard as nails. DVD EXTRAS: Stills, cast and crew biographies, trailer, BBC 4 and Edinburgh Festival promos.

Mike Figgis' brilliant experiment spawned many imitations, some by him, none as good. Against a quartered screen, four cameras show—in real time—a multi-strand narrative, played out among Tinseltown wannabes and has-beens. There's sex, murder, moral vacuums and a huge cast including Stellan Skarsgård and Saffron Burrows. Figgis' own music ices the cake. Genius.

Sonic Boom, once of Spacemen 3, reworks Welsh experimentalist Dafydd Morgan

Stephin Merritt, whose piquant playfulness with The Magnetic Fields has seen him described as this generation's Cole Porter or Irving Berlin, may not be quite ready for that league—not just yet. But his sanguine voice, shrewd words and mauve melodies do mark him out as a songwriter of genuine, um, merit. Here he colours Peter Hedges' new film with five new songs and five drawn from his albums with the Fields and The 6ths. There are clever couplets and wry winks, but the melancholy is authentic.

Uneasy listening by out-spoken wordstress

Influential pre-grunge landmark re-emerges after years in limbo

Expert Appalachian pickers on fire in '74