Khaled Hosseini's 2003 bestseller ticks all the boxes as an A-level text. A personal story with epic sweep, it interweaves the bloody recent history of Afghanistan with a gripping family saga.
Berlin's electronic music world has been traditionally been very white. Sometimes, as with the inward-looking minimal techno of the 2000s, it could feel painfully so. Obviously a city can't really help the nature of its demographic, but monoculture is rarely healthy for the development of living club scenes – and it certainly needn't be that way.
For decades Brian Wilson was depicted as the mad, lost genius of the Beach Boys, but these days, at 74, he's looking more like one of pop's great survivors. After all, he has comprehensively outlived his brothers Dennis and Carl, and has restored his reputation with deliriously acclaimed performances of Pet Sounds and the salvaged Sixties masterpiece SMiLE. He gets invited to all-star galas and awards ceremonies at the White House.
Having been to Hollywood hell and back, Mel Gibson is perfectly placed to play the battered big daddy par excellence. Here he is, in the person of John Link, ex-jailbird on parole, recovering alcoholic and former outlaw biker, now eking out a living as a tattooist on a trailer park in the California desert. Weatherbeaten and bearded like an escapee from a jungle PoW camp, Link looks like a man a coin-toss away from extinction.
In his downbeat isolation, Link enjoys a little light relief by bantering bad-temperedly with his trailer-neighbour and AA sponsor Kirby (William H Macy, pictured below, right on the money) in between etching designs of surprising elegance on the limbs of his unwashed and unshaven clientele. His copy of Picasso's Don Quixote sketch might even fetch a few bucks. But Link's new, sober life will never bring him the contraband thrills of his old one.
Thus it's a kind of relief when he's suddenly contacted by his estranged 16-year-old daughter Lydia (Erin Moriarty). He hasn't seen her for years, but nothing good has happened in between, and now she's on the run from the ferocious enforcers from a Mexican drug cartel. Lydia, it seems, killed her boyfriend Jonah (Diego Luna) when he and his gang dragged her along to a brutal home invasion. Jonah (pictured below with Gibson) was the upstart son of the cartel boss known as El Padrino, and now Lydia must die.
Link is delighted to see Lydia again, though he manages to hide his rekindled paternal feelings behind a facade of macho self-sufficiency, but he's a little taken aback to find her loaded up with supplies – bottles of bourbon and gin, an assortment of drugs and a gun. The apple didn't fall far from the tree, but Link is determined to use all his hard-earned smarts to save Lydia from following his own road to perdition – if there's still time.
His race to beat the bad guys is part road movie, part outlaw caper and a little bit Mad Max (a scene where Mel swings his motorbike into the centre of the highway to wield a righteous shotgun at his pursuers peels away the years with panache), and the narrative is handled with sinewy directness by director Jean-François Richet. The sequence where a squad of Mexicano killers besieges Mel's trailer with torrents of gunfire may well be a knowing flashback to the director's Assault on Precinct 13. Richet is perfectly in tune with screenwriter Peter Craig (adapting his own novel), who has a knack for speedy boiled-down dialogue, like Mel's capsule description of his daughter: "This kid's a carnival, man. She's every loser's lucky day."
En route, there's space for some zesty character-sketches. Miguel Sandoval is sly and knowing as Link's jailbird-insider confidante Arturo, while Michael Parks (a Tarantino regular) plays Preacher, one of Link's old running mates and a Vietnam veteran who trades in military memorabilia (his sign says "In uncertain times, Nazi collectibles are a foolproof investment"). Sadly, uncertain times also prove to have soured their former bonds of friendship, though Link and Preacher are able to lament together the way that all the rebels have been corporatised, sanitised, compromised and lobotomised by the system.
The fiery denouement takes place amid soaring desert landscapes under a blazing sun. Refreshingly, Link is not a man in search of redemption, more like an inveterate renegade who never got the point of going straight in the first place. This punchy, pacy slice of desert-noir is a real treat.
The Beach Boys signed with Capitol Records on 24 May 1962. Early the next month, their first single for the label became “409”/”Surfin’ Safari”. It was not their debut release. The “Surfin'”/ “Luau” single had been issued in November 1961 by Candix.
In 1969, a tranche of American musicians looked back to the country’s past for inspiration. Bob Dylan followed John Wesley Harding with Nashville Skyline. The Band’s eponymous second album hit the shops. The Flying Burrito Brothers debuted with The Gilded Palace of Sin. The rootsy was a default. But choosing to draw on country and Appalachian traditions did not have to mean playing it straight. On the amazing Farewell Aldebaren, Judy Henske and Jerry Yester used banjo and hammered dulcimer.
In 1966, David Warner assumed the title role in Karel Reisz’s satire Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment. The film’s Morgan Delt was a fantasist with a communist family background married to the posh Leonie, played by Vanessa Redgrave. When she seeks a divorce, he campaigns to win her back but ends up in an asylum where she reveals she is pregnant with his child. As a depiction of class clashes, thwarted aspirations and unmediated behaviour, it was a very Sixties confection.
There are memorable appearances from two great actors playing close to the top of their game in Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love, but they’re almost upstaged by something else. Nothing human – though their reunion and interaction in the film is being “directed” by an absent third party – but rather the environment in which they find themselves: the stark desert beauty and almost unbearable temperature of California’s Death Valley.
Womanising detectives, shapely dames, gangsters and convoluted criminal conspiracies: Richard O’Brien and Richard Hartley’s 1982 musical take on Carter Brown’s California-set whodunit fiction is pulp noir to the max. However, unlike the pair’s previous collaboration, the indelible Rocky Horror Show, this is more homage than send-up – arch but fairly straightforward storytelling in place of riotous, risqué pastiche.
Susan Sarandon's natural radiance papers over a considerable number of cracks in The Meddler, writer-director Lorene Scafaria's loving, largely autobiographical tribute to the kind of mum you might want on occasion to throttle but in the end adore beyond all words.