If you can remember the '90s, you have mediocre taste in music. Subtitled "The Best Of Britpop", this double CD ties in with the John Dower documentary about that media-stoked mirage, Cool Britannia. As Blair morphs into Thatcher and everyone wonders what they saw in the Gallaghers, it's not a fruitful time to hear this listless stodge. The track listing prompts an inner sigh—Cast, Shed Seven, the supremely flaccid Embrace. No wonder it was piss-easy for The Strokes to clean up with three Blondie riffs.
Oblique, arcane and infuriatingly sluggish, even by Tarkovsky's standards (makes Andrei Rublyov look like Moulin Rouge), Nostalgia is the litmus test for arthouse cinephiles. The 'story' of a Russian poet locked in existential agony while researching an obscure 18th-century composer is brimful of breathtaking tableaux, portentous dialogue and primal symbolism (flickering flame as human soul). But is it enough?
