Reviews

Delicious debut album for rainy days and Mondays

Many tentacled, notably uninhibited disco punks

Baroque release from NY anti-folknik

Overdue reappraisal of bluegrass' wildest old buck

Rare recordings from '60s English troubadour

Oddball Spanish psycho-tedium

Iranian teen's promising debut

Slow-moving account of the events leading up to the execution of King Charles I (Rupert Everett) and its aftermath, focusing on the stormy friendship of rebel leaders Oliver Cromwell (Tim Roth) and General Thomas Fairfax (Dougray Scott). Despite lavish period detail, a good supporting cast and an excellent performance from Everett, the leaden and historically dubious script renders this duller than the driest of documentaries.

Paul Giamatti, a character actor who's embodied a host of losers and creeps, always merited a lead role, and was surely born to play Harvey Pekar, the grumpy but ultimately likeable (not lovable) hospital clerk who finds a means of expression through his comic books/graphic novels. Inspired by friend Robert Crumb (and this is a superior film to the 1994 documentary Crumb), our obsessive-compulsive antihero depicts and ponders the mundane and everyday through his work, and the world and his wife relate.

The original grunge-pop heroes' '88 tour footage plus essential documentaries