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Various artists - Songlines Music Awards 2012

Various artists - Songlines Music Awards 2012

Innovative magazine championing new and classic world music acts

(4 stars)26 Mar 2012

(Songlines/Proper Music) Despite difficult times for music business sales, with popular small independents reporting they are barely covering their costs, let’s hear it for this innovative magazine. Songlines champions new and classic acts, offering…

Gary Husband - Dirty & Beautiful, Volume 2

Gary Husband - Dirty & Beautiful, Volume 2

Features collaborations with range of the jazz-rock luminaries

(3 stars)26 Mar 2012

(Abstract Logix) Jazz-rock isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and tends to be sniffed at in critical circles, but when it’s done well, it remains an exciting facet of the contemporary jazz spectrum. Like its predecessor, this album features keyboard player…

Tiny Furniture

Tiny Furniture

Twentysomethings indie with charm and well-observed scenes

(3 stars)23 Mar 2012

(15) 99min If we believe what we are told in indie cinema (and why would we not?), you can’t move in the households of older affluent Americans for twentysomething offspring who’ve strayed back home to replay adolescent dramas and avoid the horror of…

Corpo Celeste

Corpo Celeste

Emotionally complex and gloomy study of adolescence and Catholicism

(3 stars)23 Mar 2012

(U) 100min Writer/director Alice Rohrwacher makes her feature debut with this diligent, emotionally complex study of an adolescent girl attempting to square physical dislocation with incipient sexual awakening and the concurrent rituals of her…

Babycall

Babycall

Noomi Rapace stars in creepy thriller that loses focus

(3 stars)23 Mar 2012

(15) 96min Swedish actress Noomi Rapace, whose fearless performance as Lisbeth Salander was the best thing about the original Millenium trilogy, gets a chance to stretch her acting muscles again in this creepy thriller. Rapace plays Anna, a young…

Delicacy

Delicacy

Opposites-attract, Audrey Tautou-starring romcom lacks momentum

(3 stars)23 Mar 2012

(12A) 104min Perhaps only in French cinema is the currency value of beauty so high that an entire film can be drawn out of the prospect of a not-that-good-looking man getting it on with Audrey Tautou. Even Hollywood would try to pretend that some…

Rufus Wainwright - Out of the Game

Rufus Wainwright - Out of the Game

Mark Ronson-produced album's expanded instrumentation feels misplaced

(3 stars)23 Mar 2012

(Polydor) Releasing career retrospective House of Rufus last year and now drafting in ubiquitous producer Mark Ronson, all signs point to reinvention for Wainwright. Never one to shy away from the idiosyncratic in his operatic and multi-genre-infused…

Toro Y Moi - June 2009

Toro Y Moi - June 2009

Lo-fi pop trinkets and demos from chillwave pioneer

(3 stars)23 Mar 2012

(Carpark) Chillwave pioneer and Carolina native Chazwick Bundick follows up last year’s second release Underneath the Pine with further lo-fi pop trinkets dating back to June 2009 (hence the title), which should be stacked alongside the likes of his…

OFWGKTA - The Odd Future Tape Vol. 2

OFWGKTA - The Odd Future Tape Vol. 2

Hip hop crew's major label debut impressive but dogged by usual obsessions

(3 stars)23 Mar 2012

(Columbia) Declared ‘the future of the music business’, controversial young California alternative hip hop crew OFWGKTA – aka Odd Future – make their major label debut off the back of a reputation forged through mix-tapes and bad behaviour. With…

Kenny Garrett - Seeds From The Underground

Kenny Garrett - Seeds From The Underground

Alto saxophonist gives vibrant treatment to new compositions

(3 stars)23 Mar 2012

(Mack Avenue Records) Here we find Kenny Garrett – a Detroit-born alto saxophonist who began his career performing with the Duke Ellington Orchestra before pursuing a solo career — in his most melodic vein, accompanied by a fine pianist, Benito…

Roberto Fonseca - Yo

Roberto Fonseca - Yo

Pianist combines cutting edge jazz, lyrical poems and more clubby sound

(4 stars)23 Mar 2012

(Montuno/ Jazz Village) Hitherto dressed by number one French fan Agnès B, Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca literally strips naked to underscore journeying into the diaspora of his Afro-Cuban roots. As eclectic as ever, Fonseca walks a fine line between…

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games

Adaptation that successfully transcends its teen-fiction origins, with excellent cast and direction

(4 stars)21 Mar 2012

(12A) 142min A dystopian thriller with cross-generational appeal, The Hunger Games is an adaptation of the first novel in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy. From writer and director Gary Ross (Pleasantville) and co-written by Collins herself, it’s set in…

Alison Turnbull

Alison Turnbull

Constrained pieces exploring ideas of order and chaos

(4 stars)21 Mar 2012

Order and chaos, Alison Turnbull’s work implies, are both simple functions of human perspective, with her seemingly very precisely constrained pieces actually subject to no more than the artist’s own arbitrary designs for them. In large part that’s a…

Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life

Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life

Werner Herzog documentary more than righteous polemic against capital punishment

(4 stars)19 Mar 2012

(12A) 107min In an interview to promote Into the Abyss, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog declares that, ‘it is absolutely clear that the crimes of the persons in my film are monstrous, but the perpetrators are not monsters’. Although Herzog himself…

This Must Be the Place

This Must Be the Place

Bracing aesthetic and gentle humanity despite risking absurdity at times

(4 stars)19 Mar 2012

(15) 119min There is a strong sense of the baroque running through the films of Paolo Sorrentino, not least his bravura portrait of former Italian Prime Minister Andreotti in Il Divo. His first English language venture This Must Be The Place neither…

Wild Bill

Wild Bill

Dexter Fletcher debut is a mature and funny comedy

(4 stars)19 Mar 2012

(15) 98min There are many aspects of Wild Bill that could cause a discerning cinemagoer to give it a wide berth – its lack of recognisable stars; its done-to-death London gangster milieu; its debuting writer/director Dexter Fletcher’s connections to…

The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods

Excellent horror has something in its box of tricks to scare everyone

(4 stars)19 Mar 2012

(15) 94min A film that’s almost impossible to talk about without ruining its multiple pleasures, The Cabin In The Woods is the most original horror movie of the year. Reverential to the genre, yet shaking it up simultaneously, it’s exactly what you’d…

Headhunters

Headhunters

Jo Nesbo adaptation is breathlessly, outrageously entertaining

(4 stars)19 Mar 2012

(15) 101min The twisty, tangled, page-turning bestsellers of Norwegian author Jo Nesbo seem tailor-made for the screen. The narratives move with all the momentum of a runaway train and there are enough flawed individuals and crumbling moral…

Le Havre

Le Havre

Aki Kaurismaki's French language debut is a grimly funny working class drama

(4 stars)19 Mar 2012

(PG) 93min Migrating south to shoot his latest feature in France seems to have lightened the mood of the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki, whose brand of deadpan humour has previously proved to be the key in crafting a series of delightfully…

Antigone

Antigone

Lung Ha's Theatre impresses with an excellent, stripped-back adaptation of Sophocles' Theban tragedy

(4 stars)19 Mar 2012

Lung Ha’s Theatre Company has gone from strength to strength in recent years, notching up acclaimed adaptations of everything from Chekhov to Aldous Huxley and Jules Verne. The company’s latest outing returns to the origins of European Theatre and…

The Divide

The Divide

A nasty and nihilistic portrait of rapid decline of civilisation

(3 stars)19 Mar 2012

(18) 108mins Rarely will you see a film as nasty and nihilistic as Xavier Gens’ The Divide. The Frenchman scored a cult hit with 2007’s Frontier(s) before making his first foray into the studio system with the by numbers video game adaptation Hitman.

Iron Sky

Iron Sky

Finland's so-so sci-fi comedy could actually benefit from an American remake

(2 stars)19 Mar 2012

Six years in the making, Iron Sky arrives in a blaze of pre-release publicity. Finland’s first blockbuster, partly funded by fans, you certainly can’t quibble with its killer pitch: Nazis on the moon. It’s just a pity that director Timo Vuorensola’s…

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt quirky comedy romance is insubstantial muddle

(2 stars)19 Mar 2012

(12A) 107min This adaptation of Paul Torday’s 2007 novel is another to add to the list of ‘books that didn’t work as films’. The story of a nerdish Scottish fisheries expert (Ewan McGregor) and a sophisticated legal aide (Emily Blunt) selected by a…

Mark Millar & Leinil Francis Yu - Superior

Mark Millar & Leinil Francis Yu - Superior

The Kick-Ass creator's latest ponders what superpowers would mean to those who needed them most

(4 stars)16 Mar 2012

(Titan) Glasgow writer Mark Millar has really picked up the pace on his creator-owned series over the last few years, but what’s more remarkable is how high the quality has remained. Wanted, Kick-Ass and Nemesis were action blockbusters but Superior…

David Kushner - Jacked

David Kushner - Jacked

An entertaining, if hyperbolic, 'unauthorised' history of Grand Theft Auto

(3 stars)16 Mar 2012

(Collins) After a similar book on Doom, journalist David Kushner returns to familiar ground with Jacked. This ‘unauthorised’ history of Grand Theft Auto traces the game’s development from its early beginnings in Dundee to become one of the highest…

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