Trans am

Hungarian monochrome master Bela Tarr doesn't piss around with frivolities like humour, logic or even much in the way of dialogue. And yet these lean, unstintingly intense films about people walking around a lot, suffering for love (in Damnation) or trying to prevent society from descending into chaos (Werckmeister Harmonies) are transcendent. At the very least, this will make illuminating viewing for fans of Gus Van Sant's last two flicks, Gerry and Elephant, since Tarr's work directly inspired them.

Oh dear. This blue-chip Stephen King adaptation (written by William Goldman, directed by Lawrence Kasdan) starts well but then transforms into an unwatchable mess. One of those terrible movies you just have to see to figure out where it went wrong. Highlights: fine ensemble work from Thomas Jane, Damian Lewis, Jason Lee and Timothy Olyphant. Lowlight: Morgan Freeman's worst ever screen performance.

Imagine if the Doors, The Byrds or Love had, long after their late '60s heyday, reconvened to record a quartet of brilliant albums, the first a double LP of classic, even epic, proportions issued just months before punk broke.

Two-CD remastered reissue of the infamous pop opera, with unreleased tracks

Classy return to form following 2001's disappointing Argyle Heir

Shimmering performance by the Mother Superior of country rock

Adams' career is fast becoming a blizzard of lost possibilities and abandoned trails, with his 'proper' album releases, such as Gold and Rock'n'Roll, punctuated by closet-clearing collections of outtakes like Demolition and now Love Is Hell Pt 1, the first instalment of the album supposedly deemed too much of a downer to be the 'proper' follow-up to Gold.

Before the sex pistols there was New York's Lower East Side: trash aesthetes with short hair and kinky vixens in B-movie stilettos. Kids with minor drug habits and slim volumes of symbolist verse. Pre-punk 'punk' was Gotham's reaction to smug denim California and prog-pomp stadium blow-out. The new Bowery Bop was about immaculate posing, street-corner nihilism. It was railroad-apartment art-rock out of the Velvets, Stooges, Dolls, with a side order of Nuggets garage psychedelics.

Generally hailed as Renoir's 'unfinished masterpiece', this sad, lyrical short from 1946 is based on a Guy de Maupassant story. A young girl finds a quasi-romance after wandering off from her picnicking family near the Seine. It's all about Renoir's impressionistic eye for nature and the transience of innocence: a personal, poetic work which now, extended, looks better than ever.

Third UK release from rising Seattle heartbreakers