Artist: The Sounds. Album: Dying To Say This To You.
Artist: The Teenagers. Album: Reality Check.
Stop me if you've heard this one: It's a Jim Carrey movie where the star lives in a world comprised entirely of counterfeit coincidences and cardboard friends with whom he shares no evident affinity and who stampede through scenes only to bark-reiterate the premise before vanishing in a rampage of bad editing. Grade: C-
David Fincher's fantasia on F. Scott Fitzgerald's fantasia on love and death is by turns music box and snow globe—expensive, elaborate, tranfixingly cool to the touch. The homilies are folksy but spun from the finest nanofiber. A consummate prestige production: middlebrow, lyrical, finally moving. Grade: B
Rolling with it. Impressively polished. Handles like a completely native title for the iPhone's gaming platform. Nothing janky or kludgey about it.
I'm slow. It's addictive.
The kind of posturing high-tone sci-fi message movie where a tastefully muted color palette is no substitute for listless storytelling and autopilot performances from the dead-eyed leads. Grade: C+
Artist: The Long Winters. Album: When I Pretend To Fall.
Artist: Lucy Wainwright Roche. Album: 8 Songs.
Baz Luhrmann tempers his more pop-operatic impulses to present some simulacrum of an Old Hollywood historical epic; only, denuded of the director's typical flourishes, the safety-scissors tearjerker exhibits more pastiche than sweep. There are lyrical bits and pieces but they mostly resonate because they suggest better films. On its own, Australia is eventful but seldom impactful—the picturesque portrait of middlebrow entertainment. And maybe it's just me—and as pretty as they individually are—but Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman have about as much chemistry as an ostrich and a giraffe. Grade: B
Artist: Erin McCarley. Album: Love, Save the Empty – Single.
Artists: AR Rahman & Suzanne. Album: Slumdog Millionaire (Music from the Motion Picture).
Artist: The Fratellis. Album: Costello Music.