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

The Box

Director Richard Kelly
Starring Cameron Diaz, Gillian Jacobs, James Marsden

In the explosion of chin-stroking interest that accompanied Richard Kelly’s cult debut, Donnie Darko, it was quickly forgotten that this was a very, very silly film. Not just structurally, and not just because of the giant rabbit, either. No: Kelly had a daringly abstract metaphysical agenda that occasionally tipped over into the realm of the comic.

So we shouldn’t be surprised to find that The Box, his first studio film, is an equally bamboozling family drama-cum-sci-fi tragedy that tiptoes around the issues of free will, spiritual authority and men from Mars. Whether that makes it beautifully profound or just plain barmy is open to debate.

Cameron Diaz and James Marsden play a couple who are visited by a mysterious stranger with half a face. He leaves them a box and an ultimatum: they have 24 hours to decide whether to push the button on top of the box. If they do, they will receive one million dollars, but a stranger will die. If not, the box will be taken away.

What follows is at times a brilliantly conceived edge-of-the-seat nailbiter, as the full horror of their situation is gradually revealed. But it also toys with outright melodrama and “what-the-hell?!” plot twists. Kelly’s box of tricks could do with being refreshed.

The Informant!

Director Steven Soderbergh
Starring Matt Damon, Lucas McHugh Carroll, Eddie Jemison

Keeping track of Steven Soderbergh’s career is like trying to stalk a big cat through the jungle: probably futile and possibly dangerous. As he oscillates between the soul-sucking mainstream and wallet-draining independence, you begin to wish that he’d stop taking the whole film-making thing so… seriously.

So hurrah for The Informant! – in which Soderbergh has remembered that films are supposed to be fun. Based on a true story, Matt Damon plays a corporate whistleblower in the early 90s, who alerts the FBI to some major bad behaviour in his mid-West agro business.

The FBI signs him up as an undercover mole, before realising that their whistleblower is in fact a major league fantasist with some serious delusions of grandeur.

Oozing the brash bonhomie of the Ocean’s movies but with none of their smug self-satisfaction, The Informant! is a rollicking reminder of Soderbergh’s slick skills behind the camera, and of the underused comic ability of Matt Damon, who bulked up specially for the role.

Britney Spears

The Singles Collection

In a few short years, Britney Spears – eternal schoolgirl, pop fantasy and biggest-selling female artist of the decade – was replaced by Britney Spears – literal and metaphorical car-crash victim, divorced mother of two, with a shaved head and scattergun approach to the use of underwear.

Well, it’s time to reclaim the good name of Britney Spears. It’s time to go back to the future!

The Singles Collection is the ironically named title to a CD of brand-new, cutting-edge work in which Spears finally makes the move into hardcore industrial punk that many have long predicted. OK, it’s not really: it’s a compilation of all of Britney’s greatest songs. But, more than that, it’s a time machine to a happier age, when the world maintained a healthier interest in the teenage pop sensation. OK, well, the songs are amazing, anyway.

They’re all here: ‘…Baby One More Time’, ‘Oops!… I Did It Again’, ‘Toxic’, ‘Blackout’, ‘Circus’ and 12 other hits that span the range of Spears’ several careers. The songs themselves are all familiar, and yet they’re a genuine reminder that beneath all the hype and the headlines, beyond the break-ups and the breakdowns, Britney was, still is, and will continue to be an awesome force of a recording artist, whose back catalogue has provided the sing-along soundtrack for much of the last decade.

Leona Lewis

Echo

Leona Lewis is the best and worst thing that ever happened to the UK X Factor. The best because, well, she’s totally amazing: an authentic, grade A, nuclear-powered hit machine, destined one day to rule the world of pop. And the worst because, you know, how do you follow that?

The answer is that you can’t. Every other X Factor winner is forever destined to live in her shadow – a talent show tramp picking through the bins of Leona’s leftovers.

Which is all a way of saying that if Leona Lewis literally shouted into a cavernous room and recorded the sound of her voice bouncing back, it would immediately be considered an avant-garde classic. As it is, Echo is a slightly more mainstream affair, where she’s joined by, among others, Justin Timberlake.

But nobody is going to outshine the Hackney diva on her own record, and Leona dutifully blows away everybody else with that irresistible vocal range. Innocent, tremulous, effortless – Leona’s command of her voice is breathtaking, with lead single ‘Happy’ a particular highlight.

Yes, the album bears the fingerprints of Simon Cowell, but not even the Dark Prince himself can get in the way of the voice of an angel.

Book club

This month’s must-reads

Under The Dome
Stephen King

Stephen King is at it again in Under The Dome – terrorising the hapless inhabitants of his home state, Maine.

These are the same innocent townsfolk who’ve already suffered homicidal clowns, psychopathic cars, killer plagues, and all manner of other torments. It makes you wonder what they ever did to King to provoke this 40-year vendetta.

In Under The Dome, terror comes from the skies in the form of an invisible force field that descends over the city of Chester’s Mill. Planes and cars crash into it, families are separated, limbs are severed and the city is put on a state of high alert.

The dome’s provenance is a mystery that a small band of townsfolk set out to uncover, but the oxygen – and time – is beginning to run out.

Like King’s best work, Under The Dome is epic in scale, pondering the metaphysical but never letting its foot off the action gas for a moment.

Rain Gods
James Lee Burke

It’s ironic, when you think about it, that bookstores tend to be polite, genteel spaces. Because inside the pages that litter those shelves is an anarchic, cacophonous other world of hideous, hellish violence.

Rain Gods by James Lee Burke is another entry in the canon of violent detective fiction, but one that’s elevated by a kind of ferocious grandeur – a daredevil ambition that sets it apart as more than just good fiction. It is great literature.

A counterpart to Burke’s Billy Bob Holland novels, this time round we’re with a different branch of the family – with Hackberry Holland, sheriff of a backwater town on the Tex-Mex border, whose daily rhythms are disturbed by the discovery of nine dead bodies. The corpses are illegal aliens – victims, it seems, of God-fearing killer for hire, The Preacher.

With a dark sense of fin de siècle moral decay, Rain Gods is a gripping read.

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