Wage-slave purgatory in three different flavours is the subject of Seth Gordon's comedy, as his trio of downtrodden leads decide that the only way to break free from remorseless professional abuse is by murdering their respective bosses. George Cukor this ain't - in fact, Gordon has succeeded in making Carry On up the Khyber look like a revered art-house masterpiece - but as long as you leave your brain in "Park", there are just enough laughs to drag you to the closing credits.

In its second year under creative director David Ansen and in its new home at the LA Live complex, the Los Angeles Film Festival seems to have recovered from the slightly rocky start of its downtown debut last year. While one or two of the several hundred volunteers still seemed to be in it for the free T-shirt, most were clearly film enthusiasts themselves, eager to swap tips with patrons about screenings and potential sleeper hits.

It's been a decade since Stevie Nicks's last album of new songs, Trouble in Shangri-La, but In Your Dreams proves that there's creative life in the old girl yet. Fans of the wispy tunestrel will be pleased to hear that she hasn't strayed far from her familiar stomping grounds of melodious folk-rockism and tales of love and yearning, the focus (in fine Seventies style) fixing on the singer's emotional trials and torments. The voice that sang "Rhiannon" remains suitably ghostly, and even with an overlay of mild croakiness, it sounds pretty good for a 63-year-old.

The Motown label will forever be identified with its Detroit birthplace, even though it had a Los Angeles office in the Sixties. The shift west was completed in 1972 when founder Berry Gordy Jr moved the whole concern to California. Before that though, in 1971, Gordy had launched subsidiary imprint Mowest to ostensibly showcase Los Angeles acts and as a test run for the California move. This gold-chip compilation shows Mowest is worth remembering. Motown's Mowest Story 1971-1973: Our Lives are Shaped by What we Love is the first comp to dig into this all but lost imprint.

AI Bezzerides, who scripted Kiss Me Deadly (1955) for director Robert Aldrich, thought Mickey Spillane’s pulp novel was trash. Spillane, offended that Bezzerides changed so much, couldn’t understand why the film became a cult favorite in France; one of its admirers was François Truffaut, who tracked down Bezzerides and congratulated him in a phonecall. Depicting the search of the bedroom peeper Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) for “the Great Whatsit” - narcotics in the book, a box of fissionable material on screen - Aldrich’s film is a Cold War masterpiece that deconstructed Spillane’s vigilante dick and the right-wing values he espouses by making him materialistic, anti-intellectual, impotent, and even more sadistic and misogynistic than he is on the page.

Early on, Vetiver were apparently a freak folk band. Associations and collaborations with Joanna Newsom and Devandra Banhardt helped that tag stick. But constraints don’t concern Vetiver main man Andy Cabac. Fifth album The Errant Charm is accessible and none too freaky. Although introspective and tinged with psychedelia, this is old-school West Coast pop.

They say that old sins cast long shadows, but these are nothing compared to the shadows cast by old productions. To set Verdi’s Rigoletto in 1950s America inevitably courts comparison with that operatic patriarch, Jonathan Miller’s New York Mafia reworking.

Brooklyn band TV on the Radio have been critical favourites since they first appeared almost a decade ago. Always an intriguing proposition, they also seemed from their inception to be shrewdly aware of their musical Catholicism, as if they'd followed Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies before they'd even had their first jam. Brilliant, then, but tinged with Wire-friendly cerebralism.

Matthew Bissonnette’s third feature Passenger Side is a mellow, honey-hued road movie which sees two discordant brothers combing the streets of Los Angeles with an initially mysterious purpose. A likeable diversion, for the most part it’s a nicely played two-hander depicting the rekindling of a sibling bond.

Hailed by swarms of critics for its wit, warmth, compassion and daring challenge to conventional notions of gender and matrimony, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right strikes your correspondent as an exhaustingly solipsistic exercise in Californian smugness.