Following last year's release of his earlier work, this is an artfully presented set of Polanski's commercial breakthrough movies—Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Tenant. Given a ready-made yarn with a thread, he could concentrate on brewing his own unique, dislocating atmospheres and obsessions, and did so brilliantly.
In many ways, A Certain Ratio were the bridge between Manchester's punk and house scenes. Originally signed to Factory, they had early support slots with Talking Heads (1979) and seminal New York funksters ESG (1980), helping shape the label's electronic dance ethos alongside New Order (albeit without the same commercial success). Despite reaching only No 53 in the album charts, 1982's Sextet received ecstatic reviews for its taut, abrasive swagger—an uncompromising blend of percussive NY dance-funk, avant jazz and African, Latin and Brazilian influences.
Tenth anniversary "upgrade" with six bonus tracks from the undervalued Ben Stiller film which caught the narcissism of Generation X nicely. These include New Order's "Confusion" and The Trammps' "Disco Inferno", with which there's no arguing. Also, less happily, songs from Ethan Hawke and Lisa Loeb, whose "Stay", from here, was one of the biggest US hits of the mid-'90s. Fine flurries, too, from The Posies, Dinosaur Jr, U2 and Crowded House, plus The Knack's utterly brilliant (you know it) "My Sharona".
Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy is one of the standard bearers for 'arthouse' cinema. And though the movies occasionally hint at self-importance (in Zbigniew Preisner's intrusive scores and the colour-coded shooting style), Kieslowski's steely control of storytelling always keeps the narratives fiercely compelling
David Fincher's homage to Hitchcock (the North By Northwest title sequence, Howard Shore's score, the Rope/Vertigo-like apartment-as-stage conceit) finds Jodie Foster as the beleaguered mum trying to stay one step ahead of Forest Whitaker, Dwight Yoakam and Jared Leto's housebreakers
The Beeb are hoping for a kind of Our Friends In The North success with this 1963-79-spanning Soho crime drama. Its author, Jake Arnott, has written sleevenotes for this 44-song double album, which moves from buoyant '60s hits from James Brown and Dusty to '70s landmarks by T. Rex and The Jam. R Dean Taylor's "There's A Ghost In My House" is exhilarating, Rod Stewart's "Reason To Believe" is moving, and Bowie's "London Boys" is seedily weird.
