Reviews

Cynical lapsed communist Daniel Auteuil gets lost driving through a dark forest, and encounters haughty bilingual seductress Kristin Scott Thomas. An episodic shaggy dog story ensues, sprayed with romance and bleak jokes. Pascal Bonitzer writes/directs a unique, odd mystery which is splendidly acted by all. Let's face it, if you're casting a haughty bilingual seductress, Kristin's your woman.

Just when you thought that Pixar had colonised the universe of Western kids' imaginations, here came something fabulously rich and strange from the East. Spirited Away is an apt title for an animation classic that literally transports the viewer into a parallel visual world of gods and magic. Whether it's an allegory of greed and innocence or merely a psychedelic feast, this implicitly anti-Disney epic is never cosy or sanitised. And its decorative detail is breathtaking.

Subtle seafaring actioner set during the Napoleonic wars

Third fantastic album by the Swiss glitch situationists

Athens, GA septet deliver eloquently dreamscaped stopgap LP

Welsh neo-psych gang's most recent album gets the remix treatment

Essentially a Transatlantic label sampler of folksy recordings from the '60s and '70s

They do everything else with sickening panache, but the French have never got to grips with the slasher flick, which makes this back-to-basics horror as unexpected as it is violent. A sexy teen (Cécile De France) is invited to the family home of her best friend (Maïwenn Le Besco) out in the French equivalent of redneck country. She meets mum, dad and little brother, night falls, a rusty old van pulls up outside, a fat bloke gets out and starts graphically raping and killing everyone. No intellectual chit-chat here, then.

Bright, polished but ultimately lightweight Britcom about a forbidden romance between a London girl of Indian parents (Preeya Kalidas) and a white English boy (James McAvoy), Jeremy Wooding and former NME editor Neil Spencer's debut feature rehashes a bog-standard culture-clash plot. The incorporation of Hindi film song-and-dance numbers into a naturalistic story is a nice touch, but at heart this is the kind of creaky yarn that might have made a generic TV drama at best.

IN 1966, ROGER CORMAN MADE an offer to young assistant Peter Bogdanovich that the wannabe director couldn't refuse. Corman had two days left to run on a contract with Boris Karloff, and the challenge was this: use that time to film 20 minutes of new material with the veteran actor, edit in another 20 minutes of Karloff footage from Corman's The Terror, shoot another 40 minutes with other actors, then stitch the lot together. The result was Bogdanovich's first and, arguably, greatest movie.