Director Metin Hüseyin's breezy adaptation of Meera Syal's terrific fictionalised memoir about growing up Anglo-Asian in the West Midlands in the early '70s suffers a little from British film's TV smallness, feeling at times like an extended episode of Goodness Gracious Me. But the crisp script and immense charm of 14-year-old newcomer Chandeep Uppal as the sassy prepubescent heroine Meena bring Syal's rites-of-passage story to life.
First issued on video in 1985, this is a fully absorbing, occasionally revealing insight into the country legend's late '60s heyday. A fly-on-the-wall documentary charting a typically grinding US tour, Cash is never less than engrossing, be it gleefully jamming with a nonchalant Dylan (a searing version of Billy Edd Wheeler's "Blistered"), duetting with 'er indoors June Carter ("Jackson") or cutting rug with lead guitarist Carl Perkins ("Blue Suede Shoes").
Neil Labute adapts an AS Byatt novel and rather blots his edgy image. It follows Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart through Yorkshire and Paris as they uncover the personal secrets of a late-Victorian poet. Labute's emasculated in the company of academics, and the overall tone's uncertain and vague.
Bernard Herrmann. To any soundtrack devotee the name's sacred. From Psycho to Taxi Driver, his music made good movies great and great movies greater. Here he even caused a rubbish film to linger in the collective memory. Flying saucers and robots were '50s cinema staples, spawned by a real public fear of science (in the aftermath of the atomic bomb). Robert Wise's 1951 sci-fi message movie (war is bad) would today look more hilarious than it does were it not for Herrmann's tonal and symmetrical score. Conducted by Joel McNeely, here it's been recorded in digital sound for the first time.
