Reviews

Post-rock visionaries in their prime

Jim jarmusch's imminent set of dryly comic vignettes, filmed over the course of a decade, will pitch him to a new generation, as it features Jack and Meg White, Wu-Tang Clan (RZA scored Jarmusch's last film, Ghost Dog) and Steve Coogan among its cast. One of the better sequences sees Tom Waits and Iggy Pop mock-bickering over who's more famous, and both contribute to this studiously cool soundtrack.

UK pedal-steel veteran gorges on electro-exotica

As leader of Denton, Texas' Centro-Matic and its slacker country cousin, South San Gabriel, Johnson has been a prolific purveyor of all things bleak and oddly beautiful. Like 2002's solo debut Murder Of Tides, Vultures Await is a narcoleptic song suite of plucked guitar, sombre piano and drums like stuttering heartbeats. Cloaked in strings and cracked vocals, it's hardly laugh-a-minute, but absorbing nonetheless.

Listless reunion for avant-garde eggheads

The reunited Crush core blow up your speakers

Russian Kurdish community fight for survival

Brian De Palma called the first Star Wars movie "gibberish". But George Lucas' vision, Harrison Ford's gruff charm, the Irwin Kershner-directed/Leigh Brackett-scripted The Empire Strikes Back and, of course, Darth Vader—one of cinema's great villains —ensure the trilogy's immortality. Just don't mention the prequels.

The late Tom Dowd's influence on music is legendary. As an engineer, he invented the eight-track recorder. As Atlantic Records' in-house producer, he worked with Dizzy Gillespie and Ornette Coleman before helping Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, The Allman Brothers and Ray Charles. His life is traced here through interviews with Dowd himself, Charles, Franklin, Ahmet Ertegun and Eric Clapton, and through fine archive footage and recordings, Inspiring.

Ken Russell's 1967 movie was the last in the original Harry Palmer trilogy, and it's lunatic great. Retired from MI5 and living on cornflakes as a flea-bitten private eye, Michael Caine's downbeat, kitchen-sink Bond has to deliver some eggs, and deal with a militaristic right-wing Texan oil baron who's planning to destroy Soviet Russia with his computer (the titular brain). Caine is quite brilliantly morose.