Reviews

NYC's queens of kitsch mine classic-rock vault

Posthumous collection heavily skewed in favour of the '80s hits

Director Tim Burton's father-son fable is his best movie yet

Another reworking of the Betty Blue mythology, with the always watchable Valeria Golino as the Sicilian free spirit who is deemed nuts by her husband and run out of town for such sins as spontaneity and unconventionality. Sun-baked scenery and a lurch into magical realism at the end makes it more than the sum of its parts.

Up there with Citizen Kane as a standard bearer for the medium, and still utterly compulsive. FW Murnau's first US movie, dating from 1927, deploys a battery of impressive camera techniques in telling the story of a steadfast family man seduced by Margaret Livingston's femme fatale.

With a new LP imminent, the Minnesota-based folk-country boy reissues albums two and three

The American underground is currently full of unashamedly cosmic bands, like Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Tower Recordings, who mix folk and psychedelia with an unusually fluent understanding of improvised music. Unfortunately, most of their records are difficult to track down, as they're only released in tiny, elaborately packaged quantities. Thanks to Kranky, then, for reissuing Unknown Spin, previously a limited run of 300 CD-Rs. Charalambides are a Texan trio specialising in a kind of desert drone constructed from guitar, wordless female harmonies and spectral pedal-steel.

Eclectic Prefuse 73 man turns his hand to Latin ballads

Last year, in a fatally altruistic gesture, Japanese technocrat Cornelius invited visitors to his website to remix tracks from his excellent 2002 album, Point. PM (it stands for Point Mixes) purportedly compiles the best 12 from around 400 of those submitted, with largely dispiriting results. If Cornelius set out to showcase how the meticulous pastoral textures of Point could be desecrated, then PM is a triumph of sorts: only Masakatsu Inoue's "Pointer Remix", a beautiful hybrid of musique concrète and prickly ambience, really does the source material justice.

Magnificent six-CD compilation of gospel roots