Reviews

Unusual but effective struggle-and-survival story

The cross-cutting is seamless—'20s England, '50s California and presentday New York feeding off each other, resonating, as our disaffected heroines, played impeccably by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep, flirt with total internal breakdown. And still, it's all about that nose. Kidman's prosthetic nose. Bumpy, spongy, and slightly off-colour. You either buy it, or you don't.

Al Pacino is in workaday Mad Mentor mode (see Donnie Brasco and Devil's Advocate) as the CIA talent scout who lures the brooding, intense™ Colin Farrell into the fold while director Roger Donaldson tries to rekindle memories of his definitive '80s paranoia thriller No Way Out by inserting a screamingly obvious twist into a 'mole in the agency' finale.

Already a by-word for meaningfully ambitious technical accomplishment, Alexander Sokurov's epic was shot in St Petersburg's Hermitage Museum in one unbroken steadicam shot. Moving through the rooms, we're tossed across history, from Peter the Great to Catherine the Great. And it IS great: saying much about Mother Russia then and now, but also visually gorgeous.

The gothic country of Frazer's '90s band Tarnation shared much with 16 Horsepower and The Handsome Family—a Georgia-raised pastor's daughter, the South inspired Frazer's poetry. While we await the follow-up to 2001's Indoor Universe, these four-track rarities provide ample nourishment. Some of these songs appeared on Gentle Creatures ('95) and Mirador ('97), but not this nakedly beautiful. Frazer's voice has a metallic-folk edge which, allied to mariachi guitar, floods "An Awful Shade Of Blue" and "The Hand" with harsh desert light.

The movie/musical of Hedwig And The Angry Inch was an East Coast cause célèbre a couple of years back; we could (and probably did) lazily describe it as the Rocky Horror of the new millennium. Its impact on middling-to-big rock people was greater than it ever was on the British public—for now, as a charity album for the Hetrick-Martin Institute, home to the Harvey Milk School for gay youth, there arrives a twinkling set of Hedwig homages.

Double album of Boss cover versions

First studio outing in six years from recently-rejoined Flatlander

Recorded for pennies, her spectral, bewitching '99 debut available again

Monolithic early-years box set