Reviews

Novelist Alexander Trocchi's uneasy blend of Beat existentialism and pseudo porn continue to gnaw in this stylish adaptation of his 1954 whodunnit. Ewan McGregor is suitably dour as the sinister drifter while director David Mackenzie proves himself a master of sustained gloom. But it's the sex scenes, progressing from erotic to self-conscious to simply absurd, that continually corrode.

On-the-road documentary trailing Nashville's own Lazarus Man

High voltage debut from Texas rockers

Nineteenth album from a great American storyteller

Sweet '70s jazz-funk revisited

A hellish Brazil prison is consumed by riot and massacre

Sleazecore rocker Rob Zombie pays homage to the golden 1970s heyday of psycho-slasher flicks with his wilfully trashy but memorably nightmarish debut feature, which makes up for a slow start with its final descent into a shock-rocking Hellzone of backwoods mutants, Satanic serial killers, hardcore violence and unimaginable torture. Mixing grainy film stock and period detail, Zombie takes inspiration from Driller Killer, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Evil Dead and other midnight-movie classics.

Hungarian monochrome master Bela Tarr doesn't piss around with frivolities like humour, logic or even much in the way of dialogue. And yet these lean, unstintingly intense films about people walking around a lot, suffering for love (in Damnation) or trying to prevent society from descending into chaos (Werckmeister Harmonies) are transcendent. At the very least, this will make illuminating viewing for fans of Gus Van Sant's last two flicks, Gerry and Elephant, since Tarr's work directly inspired them.

Following the success of Jean De Florette and Manon Des Sources, interest was sufficiently stirred in author Marcel Pagnol to fuel two features based on his childhood memoirs in a sun-drenched Provence. Picture-postcard landscapes figure prominently in Yves Robert's polished recreation of the summer of 1900, although the human drama goes no deeper than minor family arguments and slender rites-of-passage rituals. This was hugely successful, but adds up to little more than an oppressively tasteful tourist-board panorama.

Third album from Scottish indie four-piece has roughly accurate title