Reviews

Low-budget doc on skateboarder turned murderer

This stunningly realised 1962 restaging of D-Day is the last great war epic. The stars include John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Ryan, Rod Steiger, Sean Connery and a wounded Richard Burton, but the greatest stretches come on the inclement grey Normandy beaches, where General Robert Mitchum tries to lead his beleaguered men up the dunes, and get his cigar to light.

The Vietnam war had been over for three years by the time Hal Ashby made Coming Home in 1978. Those who'd survived the combat zones of South-East Asia had returned to find themselves shunned and quarantined, like lepers in their home towns; a living, breathing reminder of a shameful war many back home would rather forget had ever happened. Some of those who came back perhaps wished they'd died out there in the jungles—the paraplegics, the traumatised, forever dreading the nameless, shapeless things that whispered to them in the night.

Tragicomic genius and founding father of black American humour filmed at his peak

Delicious debut album for rainy days and Mondays

Many tentacled, notably uninhibited disco punks

Baroque release from NY anti-folknik

Overdue reappraisal of bluegrass' wildest old buck

Rare recordings from '60s English troubadour

Oddball Spanish psycho-tedium