Reviews

Best-of for Liverpool post-punks

Clint's back at his directorial best with a lean, mean adaptation of Dennis Lehane's gripping crime novel

Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki's maverick reputation is built on a series of inspired, lugubrious comic gems, but this latest film—about a coma victim who wakes up with no memory of his past life—suggests he's in need of a new direction. The film looks terrific, but the gags are mannered and the story twee. Not so much deadpan as dead dull, it's a film about an amnesiac that's appropriately forgettable.

From Shohei Imamura—one of several 'legendary Japanese masters' none of us have ever heard of—comes a genuinely surreal fable of a man searching for hidden treasure who finds a complex erotic gush-out with a lonely young woman who's turned on by water. It's often beautiful to look at, though the orgasmic writhing sections are unintentionally hilarious.

Ingmar Bergman's early films are often passed over. To Joy (1950) has hardly been seen in the UK, but it's highly personal, autobiographical even, totally involving, moving, and its theme of marital disharmony runs through much of his mature work. Marta and Stig meet, marry, he cheats, they reunite. Victor Sjöström and the Beethoven are unforgettable.

Ninth album from much-admired and well-connected former country-rocker

Ageless rock'n'roll motherlode reconvenes Stooges, toys with Green Day and hooks up with art-rapper Peaches

Sixth album from Mr and Mrs Sparks of New Mexico

The alter-ego of Jon DeRosa (whose day job is with electro outfit Aarktica), Pale Horse And Rider first surfaced as a steel-stringed side project on last year's Alcohol/EPs. For his first LP, Brooklyn-based DeRosa opted for the cloistered acoustics of Duluth, Minnesota's Sacred Heart Church, with Low's Alan Sparhawk recording. At times minimal to the point of disappearing, this is a spare exercise in frayed-at-the-seam country, spooked by banjo, harmonium and piano notes that hang in the air.

Patchy selection from the man Quentin Tarantino called "a musical journalist, a chronicler of his time"