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Willpower is a trait which seems to fascinate British writer-director Steve McQueen. His début feature, the morbidly compelling Hunger, focused on an abundance of the stuff, detailing the ultimately fatal hunger strike of IRA supporter Bobby Sands in 1981. McQueen’s second feature, the similarly simply-titled Shame, casts its lens upon a fictional creation: Brandon Sullivan, a man whose willpower has been helplessly overrun by an addiction to lust so strong as to disable his ability to act rationally – the id to Sands’ ego, to put it in Freudian terms.

The similarities between the two films extend beyond that – both star Michael Fassbender in the lead role, on both occasions essaying a man of terrifying charisma, both feature sparse dialogue, both create unflinching portraits of their subjects, and both are underscored with McQueen’s directorial signature.

For much in the same way that Hunger is more about unwavering dedication than malnutrition, Shame is about uncontrollable addiction rather than sex.

Fassbender’s Brandon is undeniably addicted to carnal pleasures: a successful career as a young executive in an unspecified – but implicitly hip – firm, he possesses a ruthlessly effective ability to pick up attractive women (enhanced by the Irish-German actor’s almost equine handsomeness) which he deploys frequently. His ardour is Patrick Bateman-esque in its unquenchableness; when overwhelmed by his need, Brandon will call a prostitute or look at porn websites to satisfy his limitless libido.

When his flighty sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) needs a place to crash, she calls upon her well-to-do brother to help, and he reluctantly lets her crash at his minimalist, tacitly expensive bachelor pad. She’s his opposite in every department – a musician with garish dress-sense, she wears her eccentricity on her sleeve while her brother lets his true colours wash away on the exterior, fastidiously dressing in faded browns and greys while his blood courses hot and red and full of barely-concealed lust.

Character-wise, these two are the only central roles, supported well by James Badge Dale as Brandon’s lecherous boss who relies on Brandon as a wingman and thus overlooks the contents of his work computer’s hard drive, and Nicole Beharie as Brandon’s comely coworker Marianne, with whom he becomes increasingly intrigued.

Indeed, McQueen’s film really doesn’t concern itself with plot. Much like Hunger, it’s a character analysis as much as a film; Fassbender is nothing short of sensational, his piercing gaze and silently boiling desire practically scorching the edges of the screen in an awards-worthy performance (though, given the film’s subject and style, it’s unlikely to get one). Mulligan adds telling tics to Sissy, suggesting not only a murky past history between herself and Brandon, but also a depressive streak which she struggles to keep in check; it’s a classy, subtle display, perfectly meshing with McQueen’s auteurish style.

So what is the film actually like, you wonder? Genuinely, it’s difficult to sum up. Cyclic in its portrayal of a man overcome by desire, McQueen’s movie firstly ensures that no holds are barred in his depiction of the act which so mesmerises Brandon. However, his camera is observant rather than voyeuristic, catching shadows across writhing figures and silently capturing flurries of sexual activity, highlighting the primal nature of the act itself. There’s a nascent fury in Brandon’s sexual appetite, shown not only through Fassbender’s impressively unflinching performance but in the nature of the sex itself: it’s a release, a means to an end rather than the smooth, soft-edged intercourse of Hollywood movies.

That said, there is an awful lot of sex in Shame. This isn’t surprising, given that Brandon’s entire life is spent in pursuit of it, but suffice to say this isn’t a film to see with your mum. As his need becomes increasingly feral, Brandon becomes more brazen, and less interested in how he attains that which he desires.

Shame is unquestionably a brave film. Yet, unlike Hunger, this feels more like a visual essay than a motion picture. McQueen’s directorial style – frequently using minute-or-more length single shots, focusing on the grubby corners of the world and displaying a portrait painter’s eye for capturing faces – is commanding at times, but here it sometimes dances too freely. A sequence wherein Mulligan sings a haunting, haunted version of ‘New York, New York’ seems to strive too hard for the virtuoso, and begins to grate a little. The writer-director again draws magnificent performances from his leads, and he has a knack for finding filmic faces, but there’s a limit to how much posturing and subtext anyone can absorb.

For Shame‘s greatest weakness is also one of its strengths, if you’ll forgive the paradoxical statement. Its intellectualness is insightful at times, implying vast amounts of detail in simple, long shots, but also weighs on the film at times, almost dragging the movie into self-importance. The damagingly circular nature of Brandon’s life, interrupted as it is by Sissy’s intrusion, is mightily intriguing and offers a genuine, unvarnished look into sex addiction – a term tellingly tacit in the film itself – but at times falters under its own weightiness.

Is it worth seeking out? Absolutely. Does it deliver moments of breathtakingly fluid filmmaking? Certainly. Yet Shame also sometimes suffers from that most arthouse of problems – being too damn clever for its own good. A film that feels like a terrific subject for an analytical essay, but surrenders too much celluloid to exhibition over exposition.

Verdict: McQueen’s sophomore film is too strong to be called a slump, but sags too often to reach Hunger‘s heights. It definitely merits a trip to the cinema and its lack of leeriness is commendable given its subject matter, but ultimately, Shame, like its protagonist, could do with a little more heartbeat under its magnificently sculpted skin.

It’s more than a little bit strange, but Owen is not really called Owen. It is, in fact, the solo project of Mike Kinsella, a name which should be familiar to fans of the Chicago indie scene. For Kinsella has been a member of several groups in Illinois, most notably the fantastic but desperately short-lived American Football, who broke up in 2000 after just three scant years together. For those unfamiliar with AF’s output, it’s hard to obtain their music – just one LP and one EP exist – but it’s well worth your time and attention if you can track it down.

So why would a well-known and -respected Chicago musician choose not to use his own name to boost marketability? Kinsella’s stated that he simply didn’t want to be associated with the deluge of other solo male singer-songwriters out there, so chose, arbitrarily so far as I can tell, the moniker ‘Owen’. It’s stuck: Owen has now been going for a decade.

Owen’s new album Ghost Town will be released on Polyvinyl Records on November 8th, and its imminent arrival offers us a welcome chance to look back on Kinsella’s previous work. This will be his sixth studio album to go along with a handful of EPs, and to date the 2006 album At Home With Owen – its title a reference to Kinsella’s first Owen recordings, which took place in his old bedroom in his mother’s house – remains his finest hour. A tender, diverse and communicative album, bearing exemplars of the hallmarks which have come to define Owen’s music: beautiful acoustic guitar playing; the infrequent, subtle deployment of percussion, piano and bass; Kinsella’s conversational vocal style; his charming, quotidian lyricism; the mixture of songwriting talent and a personable, humble recording style.

From this outstanding album, several songs stand out – specifically the extraordinary ‘Bags of Bones’ – but it’s the excellent ‘One Of These Days’ which has a visual accompaniment.

Joe Wigdahl’s video is muted and simple, a reserved effort with few locations, but it has a definable narrative which matches the lyrics perfectly. We see repeated shots of Kinsella and his girlfriend waking up in the mornings, the half-light seeping in through the windows as she kisses him goodbye and goes to work: he, as a musician, gets to sleep in. Kinsella professes his future plans – “one of these days / I’ll get a real job / One that actually pays” – but in the video we discover this isn’t happening anytime soon. Kinsella cycles to and from his girlfriend’s house every day, to the point where he promises to buy “a new bicycle seat” when he gets some money. Its tender guitar-piano interplay, meshed with Kinsella’s engaging vocals and Wigdahl’s perfectly judged video make for a gorgeous combination.

Roll on November 8th.

Owen – One of These Days [OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO] from Polyvinyl Record Co. on Vimeo.

Zachary Francis Condon, the mastermind behind Beirut, is 25 years old. Three hugely diverse, relentlessly interesting and inimitably innovative albums into his still-young career, this fact is amazing, surprising and, on the whole, quite depressing.

What started as a dorm-room project at the University of New Mexico has exploded into one of the most highly-regarded indie acts in the world, a band who it’s cool to like and who it’s fun to listen to. Condon’s début record Gulag Orkestar combined the swaying waltz music of eastern Europe with Condon’s tremulous vocals and some beautifully deployed brass (Condon trained as a jazz trumpeter). His sophomore album The Flying Club Cup changed course, this time channelling French chanson and including similarly flabbergasting moments of brass-based genius. His third LP, The Rip Tide, released in August, takes elements of both and adds a sprinkling of pop veneer. All three albums have been critically lauded, and Beirut continues to draw in more and more listeners.

What makes Condon’s music so amazing is his unerring skill for composition, especially when it comes to brass. Trumpets and trombones and tubas combine for moments of orchestral beauty sewn seamlessly into the fabric of songs, and at its very best, Beirut’s music can be life-affirming.

‘Santa Fe’, one of the singles from The Rip Tide and a homage to Condon’s New Mexico hometown, is an example of Condon’s precocious songwriting talents and distinctive, effortlessly brilliant voice. Made by internet-television group Sunset Television, its video is a tragicomic exploration of love and loss, recounting the series of unfortunate events that lead our protagonist to contemplate suicide. Shot in a faded, almost sepia colour palette, and purporting to be an old ’70s B-roll, it’s clever, considered and creative, just like the music it accompanies.

How does you go about making politics exciting? The stacks of paperwork, the tangled legal protocols, the lengthy meetings between dignitaries, the endless handshakes: it doesn’t initially seem like an environment well-suited to the silver screen.

Yet it’s endured. Politics has been made entertaining, whether by making it funny (In The Loop) or by basing it on history (Thirteen Days, All The President’s Men) or by analysing one of its key figures (JFK, Charlie Wilson’s War).

The last decade has caused a resurgence in such filmmaking, the likes of Frost/Nixon and Good Night, And Good Luck attracting rave reviews. The latter of these two was George Clooney’s second feature film as a director. The Ides of March is his fourth.

Telling the story of a fictional presidential run, that of Clooney’s Governor Mike Morris, it posits itself as a think-piece handling the mechanics of democracy, both the noble and the shady. Told from the viewpoint of Ryan Gosling’s Stephen Myers, an idealistic young Morris staffer, The Ides of March looks to peel away the layers of subterfuge and posturing which often act as a smokescreen in election campaigns, focusing instead on the dodgy dealings going on outside the public eye.

Clooney, so awash with natural charisma it’s amazing he’s not actually running for president, seems perfect for such a film, which should look to exploit both his charm and his slyness as the situation requires. How Clooney handles his camera should also prove intriguing, especially given that his cast is so stellar.

Alongside Gosling (who seems to be in everything at the moment) are Philip Seymour Hoffman as grizzled political veteran Paul Zara, Evan Rachel Wood as intern Molly Stearns, Paul Giamatti as rival campaign manager Tom Duffy and Marisa Tomei as reporter Ida Horowicz.

With such a group of acting heavyweights involved, and Clooney looking to further his young directorial career, The Ides of March looks not only to be a fascinating proposition, but perhaps also an Oscar contender. The proof will be in the politicking.

The Ides of March is released on October 7th in the USA and October 28th in the UK.

It’s almost impossible not to feel gigantic pangs of jealousy listening to Bombay Bicycle Club. Still in their early twenties, they’ve released three albums, played at festivals and locations all over the world, have a sizeable, loyal fanbase and are rightly lauded as one of the best UK indie bands currently working. It’s not uncommon to feel somewhat deflated when such facts are revealed, especially since BBC sound like a band of experience and guts instead of fumbling novices.

Much of this gravity and depth is a result of frontman Jack Steadman’s tremulous, but never timorous, lead vocals: his voice seems to draw on decades rather than years of love and loss, able to imbue tracks with a soulful core even when they approach the anthemic. Their first two records also show its impressive range. I Had the Blues but I Shook Them Loose, the group’s first album, is packed full of blistering power and soaring choruses, while its follow-up Flaws is far more reflective, allowing Steadman’s voice to operate in an acoustic rather than bombastic environment.

What A Different Kind of Fix does is combine these two styles effectively. It may lack the raw force of the superb I Had The Blues… but it retains a punchiness which is channelled through Ed Nash’s ferocious bass guitar on tracks like ‘Your Eyes’ and ‘Take The Right One’. The former’s finale, a little reminiscent of the long build-up of Foo Fighters ‘New Way Home’ from their album of fifteen years ago, The Colour and the Shape, is an excellent exercise in momentum and focused energy, while the latter’s lo-fi growl calls to mind the intentional distortion of Swedish pioneers The Radio Dept.

These audible influences are fleeting, however. The London quartet’s third LP is far more concerned with further honing and shaping ‘the BBC sound’, and it’s a testament to their personal skill and precocious songwriting that they make a good fist of it. Nash and drummer Suren de Saram remain one of the finest and most industrious rhythm sections in the UK, able to create a groove out of nothing more than a few well-timed bass notes. The pair’s styles fit each other like hand to glove, and carry large chunks of the record, most noticeably on the funkier, almost-80s tracks like ‘Lights Out, Words Gone’ and the superb ‘Shuffle’.

‘The BBC sound’ remains a touch elusive throughout, but there’s a far more solid sense of direction here than with Flaws which, for all its lilting tenderness, lacked the directness which we’ve come to crave from a BBC record. There’s a renewed purpose audible on A Different Kind of Fix, as each song slides smoothly into the next, although there aren’t quite as many joyous high points here as on the band’s début. ‘Bad Timing’ is a touch too arch, its jarring chord progression uneasy instead of organic, and there’s a lull towards the end, ‘Fracture’ and ‘What You Want’ taking the ethereal guitar idea a bit far and sounding more like appealing background music than something to consider further.

That said, there’s still a lot to enjoy here. Opener ‘How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep’ is one of the best songs BBC have yet recorded, its beautiful, spectral opening leading into a catchy, thudding chorus, perfectly combining the quieter sensibilities of Flaws with the forceful rhythm of I Had The Blues…. The funkier efforts are toe-tappingly infectious, and ‘Leave It’ and ‘Still’ show the flipside of BBC’s music, the more considered and reflective sound which can, at times, soar through your stereo.

Bombay Bicycle Club, the former schoolboy garage band named after a London chain of curry-houses, have made a very solid, listenable third album, but one which lacks the memorable impact of their brilliant début. In future recipes, BBC should add more meat.

Best tracks: ‘How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep’, ‘Lights Out, Words Gone’, ‘Shuffle’, ‘Leave It’.

Bombay Bicycle Club Website

A Different Kind of Fix on Spotify

The release of Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of John Le Carré’s spy novel was one of the highlights of the film calendar for all cineastes, a possible classic in the making worthy of huge excitement, as this preview of it would indicate.

Many would have wondered how the Swedish director’s style, so visible in his masterpiece Let The Right One In, would translate to the spy genre. After all, this is a world we’re used to seeing through a glossy lens, full of beautiful women, fast cars and layer upon layer of subterfuge, usually captured in a series of exotic locations.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy does fulfil some of the above criteria, but not in a manner we’ve really seen before. Tracing the hunt for a mole in the British Intelligence service – ‘The Circus’ as it’s dubbed here – in the 1970s, Alfredson’s film has more hidden twists and turns than an unlit country lane at night. Gary Oldman’s spy George Smiley – recalled by the government after being forced out along with old boss Control (John Hurt) – must root out and rout the Russian spy lurking in the upper echelons of the Circus. The suspects are the top brass of the organisation: Bill Haydon (Colin Firth); Percy Alleline (Toby Jones); Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds) and Toby Esterhase (David Dencik). The problem: How do you spot a spy amongst spies?

Alfredson makes it as difficult as possible. Bringing the same grim flair which made Right One In so enthralling to this very English affair, he offers no linear plot developments, every stolen glance and unexplained meeting playing out against the granite-faced impassivity of Oldman’s Smiley. How nice it is, too, to see a director with a noticeable celluloid signature in an age of studio hacks and CGI addicts.

What helps foster this sense of total uncertainty is the stellar cast, all more than adroit at shielding their characters’ true intentions under sheaths of enigma, seldom revealing the meaning behind any action or conversation. Oldman, who along with the superb Benedict Cumberbatch (as his partner Peter Guillam) carries the bulk of the exposition, is magnificent: his Smiley must remain something of a blank canvas onto which action is projected, but Oldman fills the master spy with a telling humanity, revealed in fragments. His stony exterior never completely cracks, but we see it fracture as he uncovers his wife’s infidelity or vividly relives a conversation from years past. Cumberbatch’s Guillam provides a spry foil to Oldman’s gravitas, an idealistic young man with a firm belief in truth and a far more heart-on-the-sleeve approach to espionage.

Of our suspects, Firth and Dencik stand out. The former, unsurprisingly, is perfect for his role: his clipped aristocratic voice and swagger making Haydon at once the most likeable and most odious of the bunch. Firth also underplays masterfully, forming a rigid façade into which not we, nor anyone else, can delve. Dencik, quiet for much of the film, has a brilliant third-act scene with Smiley which offers the one of the only hints of humanity behind the hubris of The Circus’ bigwigs, and pitches it wonderfully, deftly staying the right side that fine line between overwhelming emotion and melodrama.

Incredibly, there are still two major cast members who find time to turn in magnificent performances. Mark Strong, so wonderful in The Guard, is magnetic as one MIA agent, Jim Prideaux, and Tom Hardy’s Ricki Tarr – the other AWOL Circus operative – is a riveting creation, full of conflict and misplaced courage. To reveal much else about either’s performance would be a spoiler.

Indeed, it’s tough to find the right way to describe TTSS without giving tidbits away. Alfredson’s movie, from Peter Straughan and Bridget O’Connor’s screenplay, is a finely balanced highwire act, forcing you to focus on the road just ahead while simultaneously daring you to peek over the side. For those who don’t yet know the finale from one of the earlier adaptations or the book itself – I didn’t – it’s nearly impossible to predict from scene to scene, and able to grip despite showing remarkably little action for a film of its type.

Just as the cast masterfully underplay the drama, so too Alfredson can mine tension from the most minuscule, mundane events (has a sequence of someone looking through archives ever been this riveting?) and enhances the incidental sounds of footsteps or mechanical clicking to heighten our senses at every turn, a technique fans of Right One In will already know well. The outbursts of violence, when they come, are brutal and painfully realistic, and made all the more shocking by their suddenness; this is a film where death comes quickly, and is not pored over with voyeuristic glee or dismissed with glib remarks.

The most striking visual weapons in Alfredson’s arsenal are his colour palette and long single-shots. Every shade and hue is muted here, all deep blues and faded browns, an environment of shadow and almost unsettling normality in which Istanbul, London and Budapest are permanently overcast and the only splashes of colour are blood or glowing cigarette tips. The latter technique is beautifully utilised, Alfredson’s lens lingering on faces or in moments for a few beats longer than you expect, letting his talented cast reveal tiny nuances of character through the delicate movements his crisp cameras detect so well.

Credit the director and screenwriters, too, with creating an intriguing, but never frustrating storyline. We’re constantly dared to second-guess events, but as we continually fail to predict them, the brilliance of Smiley is further highlighted, and the skill of his suspects made even more apparent. The plot’s twists – of which there are more than a few – aren’t contrived or awkward partly due to the marvellous acting on display, but also because they are so well captured and written. The more you think back over the film, the more tiny details you notice, and the more you appreciate the depth of effort put into this superb movie.

Verdict: Bled of colour but not of vividness, stripped of answers but not of questions, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a tremendous piece of cinema. The aesthetic, sound, direction and script are all beautifully crafted, and you won’t see a better ensemble performance than this for quite some time. Superior filmmaking on nearly every level, and utterly brilliant.

Ten years ago, a Texan three-piece band created a sprawling odyssey of an album, uniting religious beliefs, personal loss and lyrical beauty under the majesty of America’s largest state. A double-sided concept album, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, released in 2001 by Lift To Experience, became a critical darling and a cult phenomenon, its reputation and mystique only growing as the years passed. Its scope, ambition and soaring splendour made it a record quite unlike any other released that year, and its lasting appeal speaks to the unique creativity of its crafters. A shame, then, that it would be the only album the group ever released, splitting up somewhat acrimoniously before any meaningful touring could spread the word further.

An even greater shame is that it’s been ten years since we last heard music from Josh T. Pearson, who was then fronting Lift To Experience. His début solo record Last of the Country Gentlemen, released in March of this year, is the only meaningful product in the intervening ten years, and his incandescent combination of spectral guitar playing with pained vocal lines has been absent for too long.

Pearson, a Texan raised in the Christian tradition (his father, who was in and out of his life, was a Pentecostal preacher), is a fitting torch-bearer for country music in an era where its purest form – that of the man and his guitar baring his soul to all – has largely slipped from collective consciousness. Long gone are the heydays of Willie Nelson, longer still those of Hank Williams or George Jones. Johnny Cash, perhaps the most active country star of the last decade, passed away, leaving a magical output but a gaping hole in the genre.

With his impassioned delivery and penchant for all-black attire, Pearson certainly fits the bill on paper, and although it would be foolish to compare him to the legends of country after just one solo record, there’s a similarity it’s tough to ignore.

County Gentlemen may be a solo début, but it draws on a wealth of experience and emotion: at 36, Pearson’s life history and tribulations are far more detailed and longer than most other artists releasing their first album. At over ten minutes, several of his songs are longer too.

Often relying on just the haunting resonance of his acoustic guitar and the breathy, pained vocals he makes so moving, Pearson is unafraid to tell the whole story. Themes run through his long, but deeply engaging record and its songs – religion, self-medication, loss, catharsis, confession – and weave extraordinarily nuanced stories. How much of them are true, we’ll probably never find out, but the passion and deep sorrow with which they are sung means that even cynics will struggle to avoid the album’s absorbing humanity.

‘Thou Art Loosed’ and ‘Drive Her Out!’, which bookend the seven-track LP, are by far the shortest songs, at just six minutes combined, but the other five are really what make the album such a wonderful piece of music. The piercing lamentations of the standout ‘Honeymoon’s Great! Wish You Were Her’ and the self-damnation of ‘Sweetheart I Ain’t Your Christ’ reflect the deep sorrow which fills much of the record, both filled with poetic observations and immaculately played guitar melodies, some of which are so anguished they alone could make you cry.

Country Gentlemen is probably the only album this year which will feature ten-minute, stripped-bare country songs, and Pearson the only musician who could make them listenable: as a result, the record is compulsive, gripping and moving. In listening to these tracks, we feel like we are truly communing with the soul of the man, watching on with a mixture of utter sympathy and morbid fascination as he unflinchingly bares his deepest regrets, his most closely-held fears. You cannot really listen to Country Gentlemen‘s songs individually – or at least if you do, the impact is greatly lessened – but play the entire fifty-something minutes in order and you’ll notice a new lyrical gem each time. Of course, this expansive style may work against Country Gentlemen commercially, but artistically it shapes a unique, deeply absorbing sound which none could replicate: every word feels necessary, and there is not a moment where a song’s length is contrived. Instead, we get drawn so deeply into each track it’s a wonder we’re not a quivering wreck by the end of most of them.

When I first listened to Last of the Country Gentlemen, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Upon repeated listens, however – after re-discovering the album some months after its release – it has really connected with me, its tales of heartache and regret sung with such fragility it’s as if they might break. They never do, but no-one conveys this much melancholy, without a hint of melodrama, as well as Pearson.

Pearson has said that recording the album was incredibly emotionally painful, and it’s not hard to hear why. Listening to it time and again, we not only engage with this pain, we feel it in our very bones as it courses out of the Texan’s guitar and off his tongue. We all find music cathartic in some respect, but to hear a man’s catharsis so starkly bared on record makes for a superb LP with an emotional depth which most would think undiscoverable.

If you’ve ever loved and lost, struggled and hurt, wished and regretted, listen to Last of the Country Gentlemen. Several times. Because this is one of the best albums of the year.

Josh T. Pearson official site

Last of the Country Gentlemen on Spotify

A sweary, violent, effusive black comedy starring Brendan Gleeson as a gruff Irishman with little tolerance for rules and directed by someone named McDonagh. No, you are not watching In Bruges, but The Guard, the new film by screenwriter/director John Michael McDonagh. Of course, the comparisons are easy to come by and largely a product of lazy writing (ahem), but it would take a special kind of selective blindess not to notice them.

Both films combine elements of buddy comedy with fish-out-of-water-tales, violent criminals on the run and jokes involving taking drugs and sleeping with prostitutes. Both feature more swears-per-minute than a George Carlin stand-up set. Both star Brendan Gleeson and embrace his unique screen presence. Yet despite their patent similarities, the McDonagh brothers’ films (John’s brother Martin directed and wrote In Bruges) are simply comparable, rather than symmetrical.

Gleeson stars as Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a member of the Garda (the Irish police force) with a laissez-faire attitude toward crime itself. Sitting idly in his patrol car in the film’s opening sequence, a group of drunk youths speed past, only the sound of their car smashing into a wall awakening Boyle from his daydreaming. Walking up to the wreck, he finds an acid tab in the pocket of one of the dead teens. “I don’t think yer mammy’d be too proud’a that, now” he says, putting the tab in his mouth, looking out into the grey sea: “it’s a fockin’ bee-ootiful day”. This, you feel, is as perfect a summation of Boyle’s personality as it’s possible to make.

Thus when straight-laced FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) arrives to investigate a huge drug shipment making its way to Boyle’s sleepy backwater, and Boyle is roped in to help with the case, you sense there will be, shall we say, a conflict of interest.

Although not equipped with the most original plot ever conceived, The Guard is an unfettered joy from start to finish. Gleeson and Cheadle, as physically and professionally disparate as it’s possible for two men to be, are each magnificent, supported by a rock-solid cast including the always-brilliant Mark Strong as a professional but somewhat disillusioned drug smuggler and Fionnula Finnegan as Boyle’s terminally ill, but whimsical, mother Eileen.

McDonagh’s gift for snappy, inventive dialogue and accomplished storytelling, not to mention a directorial eye which casts longing looks over a relentlessly overcast Galway, is also hugely impressive. Crafting an accessible comedy without resorting to dull sight gags or gross-out humour, his script is not only peppered with profanity, but emits emotional heft too. The jokes, though, when they come, are incredible, Gerry combining an outrageous, yet charming, disregard for politically correct norms with a linguistic gift for swearing so eloquent it borders on poetic.

Gleeson is the ideal man to bring this dialogue to life. His hangdog features, thick Irish drawl and constant twinkle in the eye mean that even in Gerry’s most scandalous moments, we never think of abandoning him. Cheadle’s Everett is a natural sounding board, lamenting Boyle’s penchant for overstatement while also developing a kind of begrudging respect for the man beneath the mischief. Cheadle is more than game for the brand of uniquely offensive humour which pours out of every pore of McDonagh’s crackling screenplay. Cheadle’s features communicate utter disbelief brilliantly, and much to the American actor’s credit he doesn’t spend the film trying to outdo Gleeson’s magical performance, instead turning a series of reaction shots into miniature masterclasses in mining humour without manic overacting.

This central pair dominate the screen, their almost-camaraderie growing at once stronger and more bizarre as the film continues. McDonagh plays their experiences off each other brilliantly: watch on with joy as Boyle spends his day off cavorting in a hotel room with a pair of impossibly good-looking call girls while Everett mopes about in the Galway rain canvassing for witnesses, all of whom either don’t feel like helping or only speak Gaelic – which he, unsurprisingly, does not. At a slim 96 minutes, The Guard is mercifully free from frippery, zipping along at a beautifully weighted pace as crisp as the wind off the Irish Sea.

In fact, The Guard is a film which excels in getting the most out of every single component: from the actors to the dialogue to the cinematography, not a millimetre of film feels gratuitous, and in doing more with less, John Michael McDonagh has made a brilliantly funny, original movie which could scarcely be improved upon.

Verdict: A superb piece of filmmaking, featuring a stunningly relentless and hysterical turn from Brendan Gleeson in the role of a career, The Guard is one of very few films which doesn’t outstay its welcome, and one of fewer still which makes you laugh the whole way through. A delight.

If there’s one thing not lacking from the latest adaptation of John Le Carré’s best-selling 1974 novel, it’s pedigree. Directed by Tomas Alfredson, whose magnetic Let The Right One In was a masterpiece in cold, brittle tension and absorbing drama, it promises to bring the same Scandinavian magic which so gripped us all during Alfredson’s vampire opus.

The cast? A who’s who of top British talent. Gary Oldman stars as George Smiley, the film’s fulcrum: a former top spy brought out of retirement to uncover the mole working in the highest echelon of The Circus – essentially a cipher for MI6, where Le Carré used to work – he’s a picture of collected, stoic brilliance. The only man clever enough to outwit a double agent of such devilish skill that no-one else has a chance of catching him. In the canon of Oldman performances, he’s sure to be more Commissioner Gordon than Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg. Almost eerily calm under pressure, Smiley is the anti-Bond, doing his best work when hidden in plain sight rather than bombastically chasing through exotic locations.

Oldman’s Smiley is hired by Control (John Hurt) and told to hunt down the rogue Circus operative, accompanied by Benedict Cumberbatch’s Peter Guillam; the disarmingly English actor fresh from his star turn in the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes update. Within The Circus higher circles are Bertie himself Colin Firth, the Inception-stealing Tom Hardy, Toby Jones and Ciarán Hinds, with the ever-reliable Mark Strong also featuring as betrayed agent Jim Priveaux.

The plot, a hedge-maze of red herrings and twists, is sure to thrill, set within a cold 1970s captured with Alfredson’s eye for shadow, colour and composition. Oldman, from the earliest stages, has looked perfect for Smiley, and may have found a role which finally earns him a long-overdue Oscar nomination. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy promises much, and looks set to deliver.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is released September 16 in the UK and December 9 in the United States.

When someone mentions R&B in a conversation about music, there’s usually an audible sigh from another participant. Or at least, if there’s not, there probably should be. No longer even vaguely associable with its original acronym, which was for Rhythm & Blues, everything from the music itself to the three-character moniker has changed, and we’re now exposed to – or, perhaps more appropriately, victims of – ‘RnB’.

The genre has recently undergone something of a crisis of confidence, no longer a top-ten tentpole as it was a few years ago. For those who followed the charts in the early 2000s, however, the end could not come soon enough. In those early years of the 21st Century, it became the go-to style for record labels, and they duly turned the genre into a photocopier, flooding the charts on both sides of the Atlantic with ‘soulful’ male RnB singers, most unidentifiable from one another.

Fortunately, the revival and reclamation of RnB is underway. The likes of Drake, Frank Ocean and Abel Tesfaye having spent the last year showing everyone it’s possible to make good, rough-edged RnB.

“Hold on. Who’s Abel Tesfaye?” is the question now crossing your mind as you re-read the above. Abel Tesfaye is The Weeknd. The Weeknd is Abel Tesfaye. For despite its deceptive, collective-implying name, the latest big name in RnB is the work of one Canadian man.

Even better, he gives his music to you for nothing. One swift trip to The Weeknd’s official website will enable you to download both Tesfaye’s mixtapes/albums to date, House of Balloons and the follow-up, Thursday, which was released in late August.

House of Balloons, which came out in March, created some sizeable web-waves: strong word-of-mouth from listeners, healthy reviews and shout-outs from Drake on Twitter all contributed to its popularity. Its stories of drug and drink-fuelled parties where no-one, much less our staggering protagonist, can really remember what happened. His electro-influenced beats, usually accompanied by atmospheric, droning synths and super-80s snare sounds, paint an image of foggy parties with smoke in the air and tunes blaring on the stereo – they sound somehow distant, like they’re being recalled through the haze of the morning after.

Tesfaye’s lyrics are constantly foraging for clues and answers, both to the events themselves and to attempt to reconcile them with the real world. Enormously profane, but creatively so, they’re certainly unique, and when sung with such beauty in Tesfaye’s distinctive high register, they sound honest, not dressed up in bad words to increase street cred but to tap into the psyche of our protagonist. The frankness of his lyrical style works, too: on the day of Thursday‘s release, so many people tried to access The Weeknd’s site to download it that it crashed. By the end of day one, 180,000 people had flocked to hear Tesfaye’s new material.

In the parlance of the genre, these are slow jams, but ones unafraid to look into the grime behind the glamour of these extravagant parties. These aren’t the veneer-smeared club nights we hear about in lazy hip-hop tracks, but the kinds of house parties everyone secretly wants to go to, full of attractive people, weed and plenty of free booze.

A few beats into the atmospheric strains of tracks like ‘The Zone’ (Thursday) or ‘High For This’ (House of Balloons) and we’re instantly transported to this half-remembered world, helped by Tesfaye’s unorthodox gift for descriptive lyricism (this from ‘The Morning’ on House of Balloons):

“From the morning to the evening
Complains from the tenants
Got the walls kicking like they six months pregnant
Drinking Alize with our cereal for breakfast
Girls calling cabs at dawn, quarter to seven”

Yet for all the decadence of the parties we hear about through Tesfaye’s two almost-concept albums – and, one assumes, in the final instalment of this trilogy, called Echoes of Silence (release date TBC) – the truth of the songs lies in the honesty and vulnerability of our guide. Tesfaye’s not some indestructible drug-fuelled superman, but a recognisably human protagonist with troubles and personal problems to which we can relate, even if they’re much more dramatic than our habitual concerns: “I left my girl at home / I don’t love her no more / and she’ll never fuckin’ know that” he sings on ‘Wicked Games’ (House of Balloons). For all the fun of these seemingly endless nights out, he is, at heart, a conflicted soul, the kind who falls for a girl who’ll “probably OD before I show her to Momma” (‘The Party & The After Party’, House of Balloons).

Yet although the first album we got from Tesfaye was superb both musically and lyrically, Thursday surpasses it on both grounds. The two-part epic ‘The Birds’ has a refrain – “don’t make me make you fall in love with a nigga like me” – which not only acts as a warning to the woman in the song, but also a devastating appraisal of self-worth and an admission of deep personal flaws. Shattering the ego-centric sterotype of the RnB star, it’s a perfect encapsulation of The Weeknd’s ethos of soul-bearing honesty and doubt. Like a lot of the best rap and hip-hop of the last couple of years, from Kanye West’s incomparably magnificent My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to the darkest nightmares of Odd Future, it comes from a place of inner darkness and stomach-churning personal uncertainty.

Showcasing a breadth and depth of talent uncommon in artists twice his fragile 21 years, Abel Tesfaye has, in the space of one year, gone from an unknown to a buzzword. Gripping, memorable music whose appeal only increases listen upon listen, The Weeknd is something to have an opinion on, and very possibly the next poster-boy for the genre.