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

The Road

Director John Hillcoat
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Charlize Theron, Kodi Smit-McPhee

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, The Road is much more than your average post-apocalyptic adventure movie. Following the fraught journey of a Man (Viggo Mortensen) and a Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they cross an ashen wilderness in the wake of an unnamed global catastrophe, this is a moving, troubling and humane film.

If the visual literalism of cinema falls short of the evocative power of McCarthy’s prose, then director John Hillcoat has still done a sterling job in creating an atmosphere of giddy fear. Cannibals and thieves pepper the landscape, a constant threat to our two heroes as they carry the fire of a lost civilisation.

The Road is both a requiem to the death of our world, and a consecration of the hope that can be found even at the end of everything. Viggo Mortensen is masterful in the lead – shrunken and withered by the horror that he has endured, but with the proud bearing of a man who will give everything so that his son can survive.

The film has some impressive CGI, but it was largely shot on location, and the bleak authenticity sets the tone for the enterprise as a whole.

Where The Wild Things Are

Director Spike Jonze
Starring Max Records, Catherine Keener, Mark Ruffalo

Another award-winning book – this one a classic children’s story, written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak – meets another idiosyncratic director, Spike Jonze, the man behind Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.

Where The Wild Things Are is the story of Max, a young boy sent to his room with no supper. From there, he embarks on a journey through his imagination, alighting in the land of the Wild Things and becoming their king.

It is a subtle and profound allegory for the confusing and primordial chaos of emotions experienced in childhood and, in Jonze, the material has found its perfect match. A director renowned for his own playful innocence, Jonze plants us firmly inside the mind of Max and invites us on a joyous thrill ride to a world where anything is possible.

The Wild Things themselves are a fine mix of art and artistry – physical puppets with CGI features. Their interaction with Max is never less than totally believable, and there is real fear to be found at the edges of their wild and unpredictable behaviour.

Five years in the making, this is Jonze’s most childlike and yet, paradoxically, most adult film.

Tindersticks

Falling Down
A Mountain

The British soul-rockers have come a long way from Nottingham. In recent years they’ve become something approaching the in-house band for French auteur Claire Denis, writing the soundtrack for her films Nénette et Boni, Trouble Every Day and the excellent 35 Shots of Rum.

Now they’ve returned to the studio on their own terms for their second album in as many years – any long-term (and long-suffering) Tindersticks fan will tell you that this is breakneck pace.

The reason for this sudden activity is, by the band’s own admission, a new-found sense of creativity. They’ve spent the last 12 months “cobbling together acoustic rehearsals for new ideas in dressing rooms and venue corridors”, and this unexpected urgency has percolated into the music itself.

Falling Down A Mountain is still characterised by folksy guitars and smoky vocals, but there’s an insistent quality to the lyrics and the rhythms that steers the band as close as they’ve ever come to the mainstream. If ever there was a sound of the Trent delta blues, this would be it – low-down urban lyricism allied to a flawless technique and songwriting flair to envy.

Charlotte Gainsbourg

IRM

How does Charlotte Gainsbourg follow up a sensational 2009? After all, she did send the movie universe into a frenzy courtesy of just a pair of scissors and a little bit of self-mutilation, in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

Her answer is to return to music, an area that was her first love, and one in which she has the same track record of apparently effortless shock value – what with making her debut as a child, singing a duet about incest with her father, Serge.

IRM is an intriguing record. Its origins date back to a water-skiing accident that left Charlotte suffering a brain haemorrhage. Being put through an MRI scanner (or Imagerie par Résonance

Magnétique, as the French have it), she was inspired by the futuristic groans of the organic-seeming machine, and this album is the result.

With many of the tracks co-written and produced by Beck, there’s no danger of IRM lapsing into static self-indulgence. Instead, it’s an intoxicatingly ramshackle record, full of dissonant beats and whirring rhythms. It’s an irresistible and entirely idiosyncratic achievement from a unique talent.

Book club

This month’s must-reads

Spartan Gold

Clive Cussler

Fresh from an embarrassing legal pounding over the failed adaptation of his novel Sahara, Clive Cussler is back to doing what he does best – cranking out wildly implausible but enjoyable globetrotting mystery thrillers.

In ancient antiquity, Persian tyrant Xerxes the Great brings his power to bear against the city-states of Greece, ransacking the Temple of Apollo on the island of Delphi and making off with two priceless gold pillars. Fast-forward a couple of millennia and marauding Napoleon Bonaparte stumbles across the pillars in the Alps, whereupon he draws a map to this fabled treasure on 12 bottles of vintage wine (only the French…). When two treasure hunters discover a Nazi U-boat (stick with us here) that holds one of the bottles, they set out to find this fabulous prize…

The plot is based on a true story. Just kidding. It’s all cobblers but, this being Cussler, it’s cracking cobblers.

I Heart Hollywood

Lindsey Kelk

I Heart Hollywood sits proudly in the Sophie Kinsella tradition of female-friendly literature.

The plot is pure pulp: Angela Clark is an Englishwoman in New York who’s loving the lights, romance and glamour. She works for a hip lifestyle mag and is dispatched to Tinseltown, LA – home of sun, sex and celebs – to meet the hottest, sexiest celeb of the lot, Brit James Jacobs. But when Angela and James are caught in a compromising clinch, Angela has to work overtime to fight for everything that she holds dear.

It’s safe to say that Lindsey Kelk, a children’s book editor, hasn’t been inspired by 19th-century Russian literature. But she has pieced together a thoroughly engrossing and authentically warm-hearted comic drama, whose sun-swept vision of the polished glass and grandeur of LA gradually gives way to something a little darker beneath.

I Heart Hollywood is the perfect companion for whiling away the hours on winter beaches.

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