Reviews

Retired actor Alexander (Erland Josephson) is celebrating his birthday with friends and family when an imminent nuclear catastrophe is announced on TV. So Alexander offers to make a deal with God to avert the disaster. Andrei Tarkovsky's final film is as powerful as you'd expect.

Sandwiched, chronologically, in between Jules Et Jim (1962) and Fahrenheit 451 (1964), La Peau Douce (The Soft Skin) is an intriguing anomaly in the François Truffaut canon. A neo-Hitchcockian tale of infidelity, it methodically observes the extra-marital deceptions of apathetic intellectual Pierre (Jean Desailly) before rashly culminating in a bizarre shotgun shootout courtesy of Pierre's hysterical wife. For Truffaut completists.

First studio album in 10 years from top pop-goths

"Strawberry Letter 23" psychedelic soul boy wonder turns '70s session man

Crafty tunesmith puts Springsteen in his place

The "In The Fish Tank" series is the brainchild of Dutch label Konkurrent. The concept is straightforward.

Also released this month...

Double retrospective featuring rarities/outtakes disc

Full-scale album reissue programme of Sheffield electronicists' 1979-82 output, before they signed to a major label

Horror story set among the trenches of the First World War