Reviews

Sporadically entertaining rock piss-takes

Second album from Reading Krautrockers

Chicago-via-Kentucky multi-instrumentalist gets jiggy with the post-rock crowd

Metal box package for blues veterans' attempt to revive their illustrious past

New York weirdos make a strange, glorious noise

Early five-string outing from country-rock pioneer

Perverse, politically incorrect 'romance'

Robert Mitchum plays the world-weary captain of a US destroyer patrolling the South Atlantic, who becomes involved in a chess-like battle of wits with noble U-Boat commander Curt Jürgens. Dick Powell's tense 1957 WWII movie is notable as one of the first to accord the Germans some respect, unfolding as a game of cat and mouse that will be played to the death.

After a series of stunning cameo performances and a flamboyant turn opposite Robert De Niro in Flawless, Philip Seymour Hoffman makes full use of his first unopposed lead, running the gamut of grief as a successful techie crushed and drawn to petrol-sniffing by his wife's suicide. Fraught, funny, hysterical and truly touching.

George Romero's ecological thriller from 1973 combines the social awareness of his zombie trilogy with horror that's much more effective because it's much more believable: when a biochemical weapon is accidentally released in a small Pennsylvania town, it sends the inhabitants insane, so the military are sent in to mop up. Genuinely unforgettable.