The line-up for this year’s London Film Festival has now been announced - which means it’s time for me to give you a quick heads-up on some of the films we’re most looking forward to seeing during the festival. Apart from the new Mike Leigh and other festival die-hards, there’s plenty of promising stuff – docs on Lemmy, Mott the Hoople and Creation records plus Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, Patrick Keiller’s Robinson In Ruins and Anton Corbijn’s The American.
A few of you have been asking for me to write something about the new Drive-By Truckers album and, to be honest, I’ve been putting off doing so for weeks now, playing the record again and again to come to terms with it.
Sadly not long-lost footage from the '60s but film from a brace of reunion gigs in the mid-'90s by the rediscovered pop-art cult heroes. There's lots of playing the guitar with a violin bow (something the band's Eddie Phillips invented way before Jimmy Page). But the transformation from razor-sharp teenage mods to middle-aged beer bellies is cruel on the eye.