Reviews

A Kyoto skyscraper is contrasted with a crematorium chimney, gravestones abound, as do sinister black crows. And yet despite the lugubrious undertow of this, Yasujiro Ozu's penultimate movie (made two years before his death), there's a warmth to the tale of the Kohayagawa family, their ailing business and their eccentric patriarch that somehow transforms post-war angst into sublime acceptance.

Watching the fabbest of all fours in their first US press conference, puffing away on cigs and deflecting inane enquiries, you feel proud to be a Brit. "Sing something for us!" "No, we need money first." Could Justin Timberlake—or Julian Casablancas, for that matter—be half as sarcastic? Imagine waking from a 40-year coma and coming afresh to these extraordinary scenes: four scouse charmers off the plane with their matching suits and Pan Am shoulder bags.

In Francis Ford Coppola's liner notes to this extended, remastered release of the soundtrack to his 1982 classic, he confesses he told Tom Waits and producer Bones Howe, "What I really want you guys to do is make an album called One From The Heart and then I'll make a movie that goes with it." In the event, both were deliciously melancholy works of art. The film was panned. The music, however, was universally loved from the get-go. It's the best thing Waits has ever done. The horror is that it could so nearly have been Bette Midler, not Crystal Gayle, duetting with Tom.

Fine outing from rapidly maturing white American blueswoman

Debut album on Chris Blackwell's new indie label from Nuyorican global adventurers

Powerful first UK album release from Moog-driven Pittsburgh trio

Lost '60s soulstress' greatest misses

Smarter-than-it-looks biker flick

Filmed in '76, the conclusion to Roman Polanski's evil-rooms trilogy returns to the urban paranoia and fracturing psyches of Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. Polanski—who'd just taken up residence in France—himself plays the vulnerable, mouse-like new occupant of a forlorn Paris apartment, whose creeping schizophrenia grows as he feels himself falling under the influence of the previous resident, a female suicide victim. A perverse slow-dazzle.

Another Cavalry Movie from Ford, and this time Johnny Reb's in the firing line as Yankee Colonel Wayne leads his troops on a demolition mission and kidnaps feisty southern belle Constance Towers. Here Ford's portentous 'Civil War is Hell' message doesn't quite gel with his trademark tomfoolery-drunken gags, funny fistfights and casual misogyny. The resulting film is strangely blank.