In a New Jersey backwater, Fin (Peter Dinklage), a dwarf fed up with the way the world reacts to him, moves into the derelict train station he's inherited and tries to ignore offers of friendship from a lonely snack-van man (Bobby Cannavale) and a divorced artist (Patricia Clarkson).
Tom McCarthy's gem has something like the drift and precision of early Jarmusch—nothing much happens, except life.
Now that Oasis have been written into British rock history alongside The Beatles, The Sex Pistols and all those other elder statesmen they so publicly admired and absorbed, 1984's Definitely Maybe survives as a revered, although sometimes distant, memory. These days when Oasis play Glastonbury, there are waves of excitement but no huge hullabaloo about their perfunctory parade of greatest hits, and their albums have ceased to generate the expectation, the queues around the block in Oxford Street, that was once the norm.
It wasn't until Frank Tashlin's 1956 screwball comedy, starring Jayne Mansfield at her most buxom, that Hollywood finally exploited the nascent rock'n'roll boom. The result is a Technicolor feast of Gene Vincent, Little Richard and Eddie Cochran in their hip-swivelling prime, rivalled only by Julie London's (literally) haunting shiver through "Cry Me A River". Camp, corny, but classic.
"Not everyone can relate/To what you and I appreciate," croons Devendra Banhart on one track of this fourth effort. It may be the truest, least cloying sentiment he's ever uttered, certainly on disc. Recorded at the same sessions as his recent Rejoicing In The Hands debut, it's a similar anthology of songs shot through with naïve, awestruck wonder, delivered in a warbling croon that's equal parts Ed Askew and Robbie Basho, over steadily thrumming finger-style guitar.
