Reviews

Cali pop from Beach Boys' hometown

OPENS AUGUST 27, CERT 15, 93 MINS Here's Colin Firth, trying to banish forever the memory of being "television's Mr Darcy", teaming up with Resurrection Man and My Little Eye director Marc Evans to make something edgy and intense, a dark psychological thriller. With ants. Oh, dear. Colin plays Ben, left comatose following a car crash in which his wife died. Recently awoken, he now lives in a Gothicky converted hospital in grim old east London, with nothing but an ant farm for company and Mena Suvari as his neighbour. Ben starts having visions of his dead wife.

Stiller/Black pairing fails to rescue lacklustre yarn

"O JOY!"IS NOT THE UNIVERSAL response to the idea of a sofa, a bag of toffees, a long weekend and six Marx Brothers movies to sit through. Inexplicably, there are those whose funny bones are immune to the work of Groucho, Harpo and the rest of the crew. When it comes to the Marx brand of sideways lunacy, seems you either get it or you don't. This latest DVD set gathers up A Day At The Races, A Night At The Opera, At The Circus, Go West, The Big Store and A Night In Casablanca.

Arthur Penn's smouldering anti-western tells the story of Nicholson's Montana horse-rustlers and the pursuit of them by Brando's regulator Lee Clayton. The action is rationed into short, ferocious bursts and used as a counterpoint to the director's paced dissection of power and politics on the anarchic frontier. Brando's whispering Irish accent flirts with parody, but ultimately helps to lend Clayton a compelling air of psychotic menace.

Four-CD box set of bolshy Ozpunks' three late-'70s albums and unreleased Live In London set from late '77, plus numerous outtakes, B-sides and EP tracks

Pop art taken to logical extreme

Reissue of unlikely 1974 alliance between would-be art-pop stars and Marxist Canterbury art-rockers

Originally recorded in 1971, The Residents' debut The Warner Bros Album was rejected and has remained unreleased until now. Its first outing is as a remix LP, and it's fabulous. Prime early-era Residents, it's an idiosyncratic assault on contemporary music (The Beatles, Dylan) and society using chaotic avant jazz/rock/classical weaponry. To hear this already deconstructed music fed through the mincer of contemporary electronica only makes it even more confusing, disorienting, beguiling and downright delightful.

Debut solo album from Mojave 3 and ex-Slowdive singer/guitarist