Reviews

Bubba Sparxxx – Deliverance

Athens, Georgia white-trash rapper's improbably fine return

The Method

Enjoyably unhinged debut from club promoters/DJs turned recording artists

No time for rest in Godspeed's Montreal enclave, as the collective's myriad spin-offs continue to fight the capitalist hegemony with sad tunes and very long titles. Mt Zion are ostensibly the pop wing, adding vocals from guitarist Efrim and—new here—a massed choir to the usual thicket of slow guitars and chamber strings. It's debatable how necessary his croak is, since Godspeed's great gift is to disseminate radical politics by musical implication rather than explicit polemic.

M83 – Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts

Potent shoegazing electronica from Antibes, France

Inner City Good Life: The Best Of – EMI Gold

Greatest and not so great hits from techno pioneers

Various – Wu-Tang Collective

This month's disappointing Wu cash-in

It’s A Guy Thing

Quality Australian thriller about fraternal bank robbers

Othello

Filming in Venice and Morocco whenever funds permitted, Orson Welles shot this adaptation of The Bard's play in scraps over four years in the late 1940s. The circumstances—there were literally years between shots—inspired kaleidoscopic editing and audacious improvisation:when costumes failed to arrive for a critical murder, Welles restaged it half-naked in a Turkish bath. The result:the most vibrant slice of Shakespeare-noir ever filmed.

Trapeze

Burt Lancaster, gruff and manly, and Tony Curtis, delicately fey, star in Carol Reed's howlingly homoerotic tale of two leotard-clad acrobats in '50s Paris, vying for each other's respect, for the affections of Gina Lollobrigida, and for mastery of the triple somersault. "Teach me the triple!" says wide-eyed Curtis to Lancaster. "Are you crazy?!" splurts Lancaster, outraged.

Rio Bravo

Relentless Brazilian street-gang drama spanning three decades
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