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Dave Gahan – Live Monsters

Shot last July at Paris' Olympia theatre, Dave Gahan's stripped-down solo show proved he can cut it as a Byronic rock god away from Depeche Mode. From the sleazy confessional of "Black And Blue Again" to the swaggering blues behemoth "Dirty Sticky Floors", Gahan gives it 200 per cent in the Dionysian Messiah stakes. And Paris loves it, especially the roughed-up DM covers.

Secondhand Lions

Young Haley Joel Osment is sent off to live with his eccentric but loveable great-uncles (Michael Caine and Robert Duvall) and a moth-eaten circus lion on their Texas ranch. Are the two men retired adventurers, or just bank robbers on the run? Sentimental family-fare yarn with just enough of an edge to keep it from becoming syrup.

Gaslight

Charles Boyer is the ultimate Gallic douche-bag and Ingrid Bergman the twittering naif trapped in a marriage inferno in this brilliant and beautiful psychological thriller from studio workhorse George Cukor. Boyer's after some diamonds, but Bergman's in love. He bullies her, makes her kiss Bibles, and slowly drives her insane. Genius.

Ripley’s Game

Amazing how rapidly John Malkovich has plummeted from exquisite art-house bloom to a kind of Graham Norton version of Donald Pleasance, but his teetering vanity is quite well suited to Liliana Cavani's absurd yarn. This time, Ripley is pseuding it up among the renaissance treasures of Italy's Veneto region, and takes his revenge on tactless English picture-framer Dougray Scott by turning him into a reluctant serial killer. Diverting but hugely forgettable.

R.E.M. – Perfect Square

With none of the inventiveness of 1990's brilliant Tourfilm—but sturdier than the disappointing Road Movie (1995)—this engrossing July 2003 gig from Wiesbaden, Germany, is pure Greatest Hits stuff. The usual stadium-thumpers are good, but true highlights are Stipe's own favourite, "Country Feedback" (no longer delivered with back to the audience), "She Just Wants To Be", "Walk Unafraid" and a dusted-off "Maps And Legends".

The Comfort Of Strangers

Worth a look: Paul Schrader directs a Harold Pinter adaptation of an Ian McEwan novel, in Venice, in 1990. Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson are trying to revive their marriage on holiday, but fall under the sinister influence of sadomasochists Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren. Venice is deeply cinematic, but Schrader opts for much nudity and is clearly in love with Everett. Creepy.

Ulysses

Controversial in its day (1967), Joseph Strick's bold stab at Joyce's unfilmable novel was (echoing the book) banned in Ireland until as recently as 2001. This year will see the 100th anniversary of "Bloomsday": as a warm-up, watch this intriguing, prescient art movie, vividly stalking Bloom and Dedalus around Dublin, then committing the last half hour to Molly (Barbara Jefford) and her lusty soliloquy.

Daisy Miller

One of the turkeys which derailed Peter Bogdanovich's career. Hubris-fuelled on the back of runaway success, he cast other half Cybill Shepherd as the Henry James heroine who flits around 19th-century Europe falling in love and dying. The costumes are fine, but there's no feel for what was anyway a mediocre James story, and no momentum. Cybill's a fish out of water. A pretty folly.

Marianne Faithfull – Sings Kurt Weill: Live In Montreal

In tandem with her recent, more rock-oriented collaborative albums (corralling everyone from Damon Albarn and Jarvis Cocker to Billy Corgan), Faithfull has pursued her other career as a torch singer, the regal ruin of her pristine '60s folk voice now the perfect expression of seen-it-all wisdom/ennui. In the company of pianist Paul Trueblood and at the end of a world tour (recorded at the International Jazz Festival in '97), she's bawdy, wry and always wrenchingly expressive: in short, quite the best exponent of this sort of thing.

In Wolfgang Becker's entirely beguiling movie, a young East German goes to extraordinary lengths to convince his mother the world hasn't changed while she's been in a coma—which means somehow covering up the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism. A beautifully realised humanistic comedy.
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