Reviews

Ravishing pop debut from Malmo four-piece

Second helping of web-slinging superhero mayhem beats all comers

When it was released in his native Hong Kong in August 1990, John Woo's brutal Vietnam-era epic Bullet In The Head was a box office disaster. Speaking to Uncut in April 2003, Woo remembered: "When we did the premiere, people just walked out...I felt totally exiled." Coming just over a year after the brutal massacre of students in Tiananmen Square, it's perhaps no surprise that the movie—called Die xue jie tou in Woo's native Cantonese, aka Bloodshed In The Streets—was too complicated, too downbeat, too pessimistic. And it is.

Gus Van Sant's Palme d'Or-winning take on the Columbine massacre makes for understandably difficult viewing. Van Sant deliberately shoots the movie flat and spare, looping the story, Rashômon-style, through numerous viewpoints. The Groundhog Day tedium of school life and the blank-eyed stares of the killers are chilling.

Shot in 1929 by German émigré EA Dupont, this sinuous, shimmering melodrama centres on a London nightclub where the sensuous table-top shimmy of scullery girl Sho-Sho (Anna May Wong) catches her boss' eye. Under his patronage, she's toast of the town, but stirs murderous passions. Flitting between glittering Jazz Age highlife and foul Limehouse backstreets, it exudes an atmosphere of almost illicit potency.

Big Star man's missing 70s years

Career anthology that runs out of steam halfway through

Sixth terrific solo album from hedonistic, nihilistic Seattle survivor

In the mid-'80s Alex Cox, having made Repo Man and Sid & Nancy to some acclaim, was deemed a financially viable punk auteur. This changed after Straight To Hell, his surreal anti-comedy-cum-spaghetti-western, which had a peculiar genesis. Cox had booked a bunch of less than abstemious musicians for a Solidarity Tour of Nicaragua.

Latest instalment in one man's crusade to keep the spirit of the '60s alive