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Matt Bochenski rounds up the top films, music releases and books heading your way this month

Inglourious Basterds
Director Quentin Tarantino Starring Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Eli Roth

Seventeen years after Quentin Tarantino made his name with Reservoir Dogs, the wait between films has got longer and so have the films themselves. Inglourious Basterds (and yes, it is spelled like that) clocks in at two hours 40 minutes, which doesn’t sound too bad until you realise there’s barely an hour and a half of good material here.

That’s the thing – Tarantino has become more verbose with age and he wasn’t exactly pithy to begin with. So this tale of a band of Jewish mercenaries operating behind the lines in Nazi-occupied France, cross-cut with the story of a plot to assassinate the German high command in a Parisian cinema, might look and sound like the Tarantino of old, but it’s got all the failings of the new old Tarantino, too.

Yes, it’s well written and funny in parts, with a great role for Christoph Waltz as a merciless ‘Jew hunter’. But it’s all mouth and no trousers. The Basterds themselves barely feature, what little action there is gets swamped by chatter and the characters are cardboard thin. It’s fitting that this film’s stunt casting should go to Mike Myers because, over-hyped and overindulged, Tarantino has lost his mojo, baby, yeah.

Un Prophète
Director Jacques Audiard Starring Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif

This year’s Cannes Film Festival was billed as the big auteur smackdown, with the likes of Gaspar Noé, Lars Von Trier and Michael Haneke going head to head. Yet it was the relatively unheralded Jacques Audiard who emerged as the festival’s surprise favourite.

Un Prophète is only Audiard’s fourth film in 10 years, but this blistering tale of an Arab thug who becomes a Mafia kingpin after serving time in jail is the work of a genuine master.

Thrillingly paced and stunningly filmed, it delivers a punchy emotional intensity that takes it beyond the usual genre fare, while its mix of ethnicity, corruption and bloody brutality gives it a razor-sharp contemporary edge.

Featuring a star-making performance from Tahar Rahim as Malik and a searing script based on an original screenplay by Abdel Raouf Dafri, Un Prophète is proof – if it were needed – that action and art can coexist to spectacular effect.

Arctic Monkeys
Humbug

Three albums down and Arctic Monkeys’ meteoric rise shows no sign of slowing. The Sheffield foursome rode the wave of post-Strokes guitar band euphoria, but where other groups were happy just to look good and work the vibe, Arctic Monkeys established their own voice, with frontman Alex Turner emerging as the mouthpiece for a generation that scarcely remembers Britpop.

Crucially, Humbug shows the band are still evolving. Turner’s lyrics continue to document the sordid squalor of the north of England and the ragged glamour of youth, but he has become a more eloquent and elusive spokesman. Songs such as ‘Dance Little Liar’ have a stream-of-consciousness feel to them, while ‘Potion Approaching’ proves that his signature growl can still be applied to devastating effect.

If anything, Humbug bears testament to a band on the brink of exceeding their forebears. Forget the Strokes; this is the era of the Monkeys.

Mariah Carey
Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel

Imperfect, indeed. Everybody has an opinion about Mariah Carey. And it’s not even a question of good or bad. She’s a dream diva, larger than life, at once ubiquitous but mysterious, humungously famous but forever unknowable. She’s had gigantic hits and train-wreck misses, she drips with diamonds but suffered depression.

She’s the songbird who escaped the gilded cage only to realise she’d been bred for captivity.

Or she’s just a woman with a matchless set of lungs. Either way, she’s back with her 12th album, ironically titled in typical Carey fashion. Also in typically Carey fashion, it veers from the sublime to the ridiculous. If drafting in the likes of Timbaland seems like an obvious (read, desperate) grab at cultural relevance, it’s occasionally successful, with songs such as ‘H.A.T.E.U’ being a passable imitation of

Britney at her best. But elsewhere, Carey can’t resist the temptation of letting it all hang out for a classic ballad, so we’re treated to a thumping cover of ‘I Want to Know What Love is’.

But then, that’s what Carey does. And you either love it or you hate it. But even if you hate it, you probably love it really. That’s what being a diva is all about.

Book club
This month’s must-reads

The Gladiator
Simon Scarrow

There isn’t a dearth of ancient historical novels about, but while all have their singular elements, most have thematic parallels too. Not least among them is that the Roman (and Athenian empire) wasn’t nice. It slaughtered millions in endless wars, drove countless others into slavery and murdered its own political classes.

This presents a problem for writers such as Simon Scarrow, who want to make heroes out of Roman officers. In Scarrow’s case, these are centurions Macro and Cato who in The Gladiator end up in Crete and find an island in revolt. Natural order has been overturned and the slaves have got odd ideas about freedom. So the two centurions pitch in to put down the rebellion that threatens Roman rule.

All of which makes for a grand novel full of intrigue and excitement. But… really? We’re on the side of the slavers now? Somebody needs to tell Scarrow to get with the programme.

206 Bones
Kathy Reichs

There aren’t many crime writers around as well qualified as Kathy Reichs. Sorry, Dr Kathy Reichs. She is one of only 77 forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology.

Her novels, featuring the loosely autobiographical Temperance Brennan, have been adapted into a TV show, Bones, and continue to sell by the truck load, not only because of their accurate scientific grounding, but also because Reichs is a dab hand at clever plotting and sly chills.

206 Bones (the number of bones the average human adult possesses) begins with Temperance in deep trouble – bound and locked in a room. As she figures out why, Temperance is taken back to a recent case she was accused of mishandling, as the bodies began to pile up.

This is Reichs at her best, with an added dash of romance worming its way between the cadavers for good measure.

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