Album: The Struts - Strange Days

★★★★ THE STRUTS - STRANGE DAYS Glam rock revivalists get productive during lockdown for entertaining third album

Glam rock revivalists get productive during lockdown for entertaining third album

Making sourdough, PE with Joe Wicks, writing a novel… none of that for Derby’s finest purveyors of unapologetically retro rock. Instead, the Struts decided to make the most of lockdown by recording a new album – all piling into producer Jon Levine’s Los Angeles house (having got themselves COVID-tested first) and spending ten days coming up with this, the follow up to their 2014 debut Everybody Wants and 2016's Young&Dangerous.

Kajillionaire review - quirks, strangeness and charm from Miranda July

★★★★ KAJILLIONAIRE Quirks, strangeness and charm from Miranda July

Every family is its own cult: small-time LA scam artists and their daughter's struggle for autonomy

Old Dolio, the oddly named central character played, wonderfully, by Evan Rachel Wood in Miranda July’s third feature film, learned to forge signatures before she could write. “In fact that’s how she learned to write,” says her father Robert (the great Richard Jenkins) proudly.

Blu-ray: This Gun for Hire

★★★ BLU-RAY: THIS GUN FOR HIRE The patchy film noir that made Alan Ladd a screen phenomenon

The patchy film noir that made Alan Ladd a screen phenomenon

The 1942 thriller This Gun for Hire, which opened five months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was closely adapted from Graham Greene’s 1936 novel A Gun for Sale by Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett and directed for Paramount by the veteran William Tuttle. Though no masterpiece, it's a film noir landmark – an essential watch.

Blu-ray: Safety Last!

Terrifying and exhilarating - one of the greatest silent comedies returns

Comparing Harold Lloyd with Keaton and Chaplin is difficult. Though the input he brought to his films was crucial, Lloyd didn’t write or direct, and there’s much discussion as to whether he was a genuine comedian or a straight actor playing the part of one, his matinee idol appearance befitting a conventional leading man. Lloyd’s trademark horn-rimmed spectacles were suggested by producer Hal Roach, concerned that his star property was too handsome to be funny. The glasses are a superb prop, Lloyd’s normality making his physical comedy all the more effective.

She Dies Tomorrow review - intimations of mortality

★★★★ SHE DIES TOMORROW Amy Seimetz's apocalyptic gloom fest

Kate Lyn Sheil excels in Amy Seimetz's apocalyptic gloom fest

Watching the semi-satirical psychological horror film She’ll Die Tomorrow conjures the last lines of TS Eliot’s "The Hollow Men": “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” Writer-director Amy Seimetz’s second feature doesn’t depict a widescreen apocalypse – it’s a low-budget indie, after all – but offers a collective whimper from a not very likeable group of people l

Album: Katy Perry - Smile

Is it possible to grow up in public when you're at the top of the celebrity tree?

Katy Perry occupies an odd position. By some measure the biggest pop star in the world over the last decade, with streams in the billions, she’s always been an awkward mix of old-school razzle-dazzle showbiz hucksterism, knowing sass and awkward vulnerability.

Album: Sparks - A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip

★★★★ SPARKS - A STEADY DRIP, DRIP, DRIP Arch rhymes and secreted emotion from veteran LA ironists

Arch rhymes and secreted emotion from veteran LA ironists

Apparently a freaky, brilliant novelty in 1974, Sparks have proved eternally invincible: the synthpop duo template, glam and disco avatars, chasing the pop grail across the globe as their latest mode hit the local chart mark. Lightly worn resilience and diligent application underpin their endurance (Russell Mael told me 20 years ago that he felt a professional responsibility to remain a good-looking singer).

Perry Mason, Sky Atlantic review - low life and hard times in Depression-era LA

★★★★  PERRY MASON, SKY ATLANTIC What Perry did before he became a courtroom superstar

What Perry did before he became a courtroom superstar

Rather like David Suchet’s Poirot, the world will always think of Raymond Burr as the doughty defence lawyer Perry Mason, whom he played in nine TV series and 26 TV movies between 1957 and 1993. But Burr’s Mason existed before the age of the prequel, which now brings us HBO’s impressively-mounted back story of the battling attorney (showing on Sky Atlantic).