Reviews

The latest of several Bob Marley documentaries on the market contains little footage of the man himself. But Spiritual Journey makes up for it with revealing interviews from the likes of son Ziggy and former Jamaican premier Michael Manley, and such fascinating archive material as BBC2's Newsnight report on Marley's funeral in 1981. The result is a thoughtful film that intelligently explains just how and why he became the Third World's first genuine superstar.

Second likeable album by singer/guitarist once known as Spiral Stairs

Feisty, top-drawer compilation from Californian shit-stirrers

Limited edition third album, recorded live over seven days and out in double-quick time

Exhaustive trawl through Pierce's archives

Legendary '60s Bay Area quintet featuring the notoriously frazzled Skip Spence

Mountain-harmony brilliance revisited

DIRECTED BY Edward Zwick STARRING Tom Cruise, Ken Watanabe, Hiroyuki Sanada, Timothy Spall Opens January 9, Cert 15, 154 mins Very loosely based on the development of trade links between the US and Japan in the 1870s, signalling the end of Shogunate rule and the beginning of Japan's Meiji Restoration era, The Last Samurai details the exploits of fictional cavalry hero Captain Nathan Algren (Cruise). Dispirited by the violence he's inflicted on the Indian nation, Algren accepts a lucrative assignment to train Japanese riflemen.

To say this ultraviolent 1983 flick is Chuck Norris'best movie might smack of faint praise, but what's good is mostly down to David Carradine as his strutting, butt-kicking, cigar-sucking nemesis. It's a modern-day western, heavy on the spaghetti, with Norris'Texas ranger taking on Carradine's gun-runner and his army of disposable borderland Mexicans. Did Walter Hill watch this before making Extreme Prejudice?

A kind of Australian answer to Lock, Stock...without the masturbatory middle-class fascination with lowlife machismo, David Caesar's exuberant yarn about slot machine wars in 1960s Sydney is a riot of garish hues and lurid trouser suits. Toni Collette rises above a routine plot and meaty cast (Bryan Brown, Sam Neill) with her sassy gangster's moll routine.