Reviews

Lopsided twofer

The East End boy's entire CBS output remastered and reintroduced to a world perhaps now ready for it

An Altman disappointment

This documentary about chess grand master Gary Kasparov's duel against IBM computer Deep Blue, in which man was eventually ground down by machine, appears sympathetic to Kasparov's suggestion that IBM cheated, though there appears to be scant hard evidence to support his claim. Kasparov comes across as vain and arrogant and, while this film manages to bring a certain tension to the game, you find yourself pulling for the machine.

This fictitious backstory to the creation of Vermeer's best-known painting looks so impressive, and so precisely mimics the colours the 17th-century Dutchman used, it's a while before you realise it's just a prissy costume drama starring Colin Firth and pouty Scarlett Johansson. A dainty tale of repressed lust, perfectly pitched at its middlebrow audience.

Jean-Pierre Melville's penultimate film, from 1970, is the crime movie's Once Upon A Time In The West, a dark meditation on the iconography of hats, trenchcoats, guns, and the rituals of the heist. Alain Delon is the glacial master thief planning to take down a Parisian jewellery store, though he knows the cops are closing in. A steely, moody piece.

An Easy Riders, Raging Bulls companion piece, co-directed by Fisher King screenwriter Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme, this is a worthwhile talking-heads-and-clips trawl through Hollywood's 1970s renaissance. It lacks any hint of critical distance but is valuable for collecting the testimony of the usual suspects, including Corman, Scorsese, Coppola, Friedkin, Altman, Bogdanovich, Hopper and Paul Schrader on pretty funny form: "The film business was a decadent, decaying, emptied whorehouse, and it had to be assaulted."

You might be expecting this to be a car crash of a second album, an anachronism long since superseded in relevance and sonics by the likes of Dizzee Rascal. But A Grand Don't Come For Free is in fact an extraordinary thing—a concept album, possibly the first garage opera, with a storyline that magnifies the frustration and decay captured so brilliantly on 2002's Original Pirate Material. The story details a particularly ruinous week in Mike Skinner's life; focusing on the loss of his £1000 savings, his broken TV and the collapse of his relationship with his girlfriend.

Two towering '80s icons get back on track but with some way to go

German nu-jazz duo draft in classy support for luscious Afro-Latin debut