Reviews

Stylish slice of sub-John Woo heroic bloodshed

Ling (Samuel Hui) and his tomboy sister are charged with keeping a sacred scroll from the clutches of their self-serving Sifu and the scarier-than-they-sound Royal Eunuchs. With multiple directors and more characters than it can handle, the cracks show, but the swordplay and comedic touch proved popular enough to spawn two sequels.

Abel Ferrara made these almost simultaneously in '95, and they're especially intense even for him. The more successfully operatic first (Chris Walken, Chris Penn, Vincent Gallo) follows a family of '30s gangsters on a revenge mission; the second's a gory monochrome vampire flick starring Lili Taylor (and Walken again). Nietzschean, neurotic.

Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder sleepwalk their way through Arthur Hiller's one-joke 1989 comedy as the accidental owners of a missing microchip who are pursued by an assortment of shady villains. Pryor's blind and Wilder's deaf, but Hiller's pedestrian direction settles for routine caper thriller moves rather than fully exploring the comic potential of this offbeat premise.

Aptly-titled fourth album from woozy New York quartet

Though the herd may not acknowledge it, there's a minority of us who, the minute a billion-dollar special effects epic starts doing dizzying digital fairground tricks, lean to wondering whether we shut the fridge door before coming out. Just as the average male can't see household dust, even when it's pointed out, some of us don't get what the fuss is with this CGI lark. So they made someone fly, by cheating, by touching up the evidence. Whoop-ti-doo.

German romanticism reborn on former busker's second album

The image of a band waltzing on the spot seems to accompany every Tindersticks album. Perhaps it's the curse of a band fortunate to work out a distinctive and effective sound at their inception. Whatever, Waiting For The Moon is the usual impeccably crafted artefact, though it's questionable whether anyone who owns their first two albums needs it in their lives. The aspirations to soul that marked out 2001's Can Our Love...

Featherweight US rockers at their commercial peak

Belated release of 1979 live session