Leaving aside for a moment the issue of whether an unshown TV special from '68 could capture, as the opening credits suggest, "the spontaneity, aspirations and communal spirit of an entire era" any more accurately than, say, Catweazle or Do Not Adjust Your Set, and regardless of whether you think Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed are the fulcrum points of a generation or just something that music critics of a certain age should learn to get over, the portents of this cryogenically preserved moment in rock time are undeniable. Look!
112 minutes of Robert Altman's floaty, wispy ambient eavesdropping in the company of Chicago's Joffrey Ballet, with producer/star Neve Campbell drifting into dance numbers, performing a few grands jetes, drifting out again, snogging non-dancing co-star James Franco, then it's back to the real troupe, dancing, rehearsing, then dancing again. A test for even the most ardent Altman fan.
Recorded in Seattle in October 1992, this concert performance by Edgar Froese's Krautrock pioneers is less dull than it may sound, with the live footage intercut with the films and graphics used for the band's dramatic backdrop projections. There's a dynamite version of "Purple Haze", but at times the music veers too far into jazz-rock noodling. And, at 45 minutes, it's hardly value for money.
Thriller from '81 based on Whitley Strieber's novel, directed by Michael Woodstock Wadleigh, and by no means a conventional werewolf tale. Albert Finney is the cop investigating incredible gory deaths in New York... but are terrorists to blame, or animals, or Native American shape-shifters? Unusual camera techniques, a great performance from Finney, and a genuinely supernatural atmosphere that builds and builds.
While the US administration portray. Iran as hostile to culture and dissent, Samira Makhmalbaf's films suggest otherwise. Her 1997 debut, made when she was 17, tells the story of the Naderi family (played by themselves), whose daughters were kept unwashed and imprisoned until they were 12. Simple, painterly, weirdly engaging, it subtly reveals that excessive faith and the repression of women are outmoded concepts even in that 'axis-of-evil' capital Tehran.
Uncut recounted the tale of Fleetwood Mac's improbable reunion at length in May last year (Take 72). Now come two DVD releases commemorating the resumption of rock'n'roll's longest-running soap opera. Live In Boston is a straightforward concert film shot in September 2003 on their first tour in five years. The band clearly miss Christine McVie, the only member of the classic mid-'70s line-up not to participate, and on one level, they offer up stadium rock of the blandest kind.
RELEASED A YEAR after Sergio Leone created the genre with A Fistful Of Dollars (1965), Django, directed by Leone's onetime assistant Sergio Corbucci, was the movie that saw the spaghetti western explode; a fact borne out by the countless unauthorised sequels it spawned across Europe and beyond (as far as Jamaica, where Perry Henzell's 1973 Rude Boy classic The Harder They Come paid heavy homage). Blue-eyed Franco Nero plays the eponymous mystery gunslinger, wandering in from the filthy wilderness, dragging a coffin behind him, toward a Hellish-looking bordertown.
The old warhorse's socio-political eco-musical in miniature