The appearance of Werner Herzog as the icy criminal mastermind in Tom Cruise’s most recent film, Jack Reacher, may have come as a surprise to those who assumed that the German director wouldn’t have much interest in such conventional film making.

Checking emails over the weekend, I was more than passingly alarmed when I got a message from a friend asking if I’d heard the news about Lou Reed. This sounded somewhat ominous. Lou has looked decidedly frail at recent London shows and he is after all 71 and despite being sober for many years has not always led the kind of lifestyle that could be described as wholly healthy. For a long time, he seemed alongside Keith Richards the rock star most likely to become a casualty of what might euphemistically be described as reckless living. Could the excesses of his past finally have caught up with him?

Getting it together in the suburbs seems to be a peculiarly middle class rite of passage – the moment when city living is no longer tenable and a migration in pursuit of wider spaces, cleaner living and better schools is required. Such considerations are behind the decision taken by Nathaniel and Julia Noailles, who with their young, Aspergersy son Copley exchange their life in Boston for a more spacious existence in Dolores Woods, a large development on the outskirts of an un-named Midwestern city, in Patrick Flanery’s tremendous new novel, Fallen Land.

I don’t know if you saw it, but BBC2’s David Bowie documentary, Five Years, screened at the weekend, was very entertaining. A lot of the archive footage was familiar, but there were also some splendidly unexpected highlights, like a sequence of Bowie filmed at Andy Warhol’s Factory, which rather vividly suggested that Bowie’s talent for mime isn’t perhaps all it’s cracked up to be in which he pretended to unspool his own entrails and pluck out his heart, a performance that was doubtless accompanied by much sniggering from Andy's crowd.

If, as internet speculation and promo footage imply, “Tomorrow’s Harvest” has a Cold War/atomic age subtext, Boards Of Canada’s focus is, as ever, long-range and aesthetic: less on the actual devastation wrought by nuclear weapons, more on nebulous creep and on the terrible beauty of a mushroom cloud when observed from a relatively safe distance. It’s a potentially glib way of toying with signifiers: Armageddon as nature documentary.

It seems as if a month doesn’t go by without the release of a new Ben Wheatley film. I'm exaggerating, of course, but Wheatley is certainly becoming one of Britain’s most prolific film makers, with four full-length features since 2009 – as well as two series of Johnny Vegas’ sitcom, Ideal – under his belt.

A couple of months ago, I was staying with an old friend, whose teenage daughter was heading out to an ‘80s movie all-nighter. Before she went, she listed what they were going to watch; Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – the kind of John Hughes films that are now routinely used as exemplars of that decade. Her father and I were talking, and we realised we hadn’t actually seen any of them.

Uncut contributor Damon Wise is at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Here's his first look review of the new Coen brothers film, set in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s: Inside Llewyn Davis...

Before the doors of the Dome Studio Theatre even open tonight (Saturday, May 18), there's an excited queue stretching most of the way down the street. Not surprising considering one of the most hyped groups of this year, Irish band The Strypes, are first on the bill.

While last night's Club Uncut at Brighton's Great Escape festival hosted bands with a definite Americana bent, Friday (May 17) sees the invasion of US-based (or -inspired) garage-rockers.