Reviews

Debut album from French graphic designer and film-maker

Emotive album from London-Irish laptop folkie

Beats'n'ballads nu-folk fusion

The poet laureate of hooliganism returns

To some, the Captain's 1982 No 1 romp through Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Happy Talk" was the ultimate punk sell-out. Silly beggars! It was, of course, a hilarious act of screwball subversion. Either way, its Goonish novelty was unrepresentative of the two albums that followed. As the best bits collated here show, solo Sensible traded in the same satirical Englishness as The Kinks and Madness ("Croydon", "A Nice Cup Of Tea").

The American fighting forces skillfully ridiculed

Banned in 1939 by a pre-War French government, for being 'demoralising', Jean Renoir's transparently allegorical film is set in a decadent chateau during a hunting weekend when pointed badinage, back-stabbing and partner-swapping suddenly erupt in an act of murder. Watch out for the ominous 'shooting party' scene, with heavily armed toffs turning a rabbit-hunt into a bloody massacre/metaphor.

Beloved spoof western which follows Jane Fonda's eponymous heroine, a schoolmarm-turned-outlaw, as she hires Lee Marvin's washed-up drunken gunslinger to stand against the lethal, tinnosed varmint (Marvin again) who killed her father. Never quite as funny as it thinks, but Marvin is sharp as a razor.

Like something director/star Clint Eastwood and his trusty Malpaso production company knocked off in a weekend, Blood Work is a soulless chunk of Dirty Harryology. Yet again playing the geriatric-but-noble card, Clint is former FBI profiler Terry McCaleb, who's brought out of retirement to catch a nasty serial killer who once gave him a heart attack (don't ask!).

Ambitious but overbearing young Aussie outfit make identikit MTV-oriented debut album