Trans am

US-only album from '96 gets UK release

Wes Craven directed this fairly faithful adaptation of DC's horror comic muck monster: a scientist caught in a chemical explosion in a Louisiana swamp gets transformed into a vegetable superbeing. Sadly, the script's clunky and the make-up SFX are tatty beyond belief—notably, the rubber suit that makes ol' Swampy look like a giant walking turd. Result; a travesty.

Writer Jean Genet's sole completed film (albeit only 25 minutes long), despite his lifelong fascination with cinema. Once outlawed due to the presence of an erection, this erotic fever-dream of prison-cell sexual tension represents a remarkable distillation of Genet's poetic themes and preoccupations. The transfer of this 1950 classic is pristine.

Musical melodrama offers glimpse of Thai culture

Luc Besson oversaw this brain-batteringly stoopid collision between hopped-up, old-school kung-fu flick and Lock Stockish Brit gangster movie. Jason Statham just about gets his mouth around some sub-Tarantino dialogue as an ex-special forces getaway driver caught up in bad business involving a slave ring in Nice. Risible.

After the early patronage of Howe Gelb, Oregon's Matt Ward dished up 2001's End Of Amnesia, one of the most breathtaking albums of recent years. Transfiguration...is another masterclass in deft guitar picking, smudged with piano, harmonica and a voice like honey drizzled onto a dry creekbed. The behind-a-screen-door quality of production adds to the strangeness, while the likes of "Undertaker" often stop, start, scuff around then veer off at a tangent. Somewhere between a Gelb bothering to finish off songs and The Band at their most bucolic.

Coldplay join Echo & The Bunnymen singer on first solo outing since 1992

Sublime second LP from Chicago quartet

Unheralded Chicago-based tunesmith comes of age

First UK releases for currently hot band