Reviews

Michael Haneke has often meted out cruel and unusual punishments to his characters. You might think of the middle class couple in Funny Games, an oppressed music professor in The Piano Teacher, or an entire town in The White Ribbon. Amour, however, provides a corrective of sorts.

No myth-making here: just an impressive document of old friends blowing minds again...

Despite the silly title and gorilla sleeve, this 3CD compilation proves a respectable primer...

Cosmic collaboration from two electronic masters...

Pounding folk debut album from Denver, Colorado-based trio...

More death, Vicar? Aged 76, KK faces down the Reaper...

The last wilful testaments of a true original...

Satisfaction guaranteed! The band's fascinated early days...

Paul Thomas Anderson begins and ends The Master with the same image: Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), lying on a beach in the South Pacific in the closing days of World War II, nestled up close to the figure of a woman carved in the sand. Bent out of shape by the war, he is alcoholic and possibly deranged. In a series of weird, unconnected images, we see Freddie siphoning petrol from the tank of an aircraft, masturbating into the Pacific surf, lying in a hammock on a warship.

Hard to believe that Woody Guthrie, conceivably, could still be alive in 2012, given that he’s been gone for 45 years. Yet his incomparable work, especially circa 1939-1949, and the indomitable spirit of that work, a Big Bang of social-consciousness-in-song that set off reverberations down through history – from Dylan and Ochs and the whole early ’60s folk revival and on to Joe Strummer’s righteous punk rebellion – resonates still, as long as repression, corruption, and abuse of power still flourish.