Reviews

Second album from French four-piece sets this year's pop gold standard

Adventurous second album from Belgian soundscape-jazzers

Ex-Barefoot Contessa's solo debut

How New York's hippie hoppers ushered in the philosophical D.A.I.S.Y. Age. And then pronounced themselves Dead

Second album (1989) from alt.country trailblazers, with three bonus tracks

Hip hop from Aussie all-female collective

Sleazy, nihilistic classic returns uncut

Though it didn't burn up the box office during its theatrical release, Danny Boyle's jittery zombie flick is actually a far more satisfying small-screen experience. Gone is the distracting texture of large-scale digital video, and gone too is the weight of expectation (will it be better than The Beach?). Instead, the movie simply plays as it is—a brashly original post-apocalyptic B-movie.

Written by Joel Schumacher, Car Wash traces a day in the life of the Dee-Luxe car wash in smoggy downtown LA circa 1976. Part blaxploitation comedy and part Altman-esque ensemble drama, the huge cast includes Antonio "Huggy Bear" Fargas and, in a brief cameo, Richard Pryor. Norman Whitfield's score is a trash classic, but the story's muddled and full of dated caricatures.

Anthony Hopkins completes his Hannibal Lecter set with this remake of Michael Mann's Manhunter (1986). It's more faithful to Thomas Harris' novel, but a lot less stylish, and the performances are uniformly worse: Ed Norton is merely adequate as the empathic FBI detective, while Ralph Fiennes is positively wooden as serial killer Francis Dolarhyde, and even Hopkins is below par.