When Robert Duvall first looms into sight here, a menacing silhouette whose reputation scares children sick, it's impossible not to think of his first big-screen role almost 50 years ago.

With Doug Liman's name poised Tarantino-ishly as executive producer above the credits, this debut feature by Mongolian-born Chinese advertising whiz-kid Wuershan presents itself as an east-west hybrid.

Some albums are more important for what they are than what they deliver. So it is with this double-disc, the final concert Bob Marley ever played: September 23, 1980 in Pittsburgh.

Duran Duran must have felt pretty slick when they returned to the studio to record their 13th studio album. They had Mark Ronson - the guy who produced Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen and Adele - behind them.

Having helped make the world safe again for garage rock on 2001 debut Is This It and its 2003 follow-up, the Strokes seemed to lose their way on 2006 third album First Impressions of Earth.

It was 1956 and Eric Newby, the man who would become one of Britain's most admired travel writers, was stuck in a fitting room with a designer, a model and a lady with a mouth full of pins.

Stories of young, attractive women desperately trying to escape their small-town roots by allowing themselves to be seduced by older, apparently more worldly men, are not new.

You hear of performers playing their audiences, but Bobby McFerrin really did use his Auckland audience as a musical instrument last night.

Russell Baillie reviews the first night of Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly's Auckland Arts Festival season.

Graham Reid is left wanting more from San Francisco's Jason Robert Quever.

Lest I be labelled a seal-clubber and eater of endangered species, I say at the start that no sensible person could disagree with any assertion in this film.

With the three members of REM now all into their fifties, it would be nice to report that they've fixed whatever stopped their Noughties albums being as vital as the ones which got them there.

Langley's rootsy folk-cum-alt.country EP Lost Companions of 2007, recorded in Wellington, announced a mature lyricist and a singer with a delivery like the best Americana artists with a little Dylanesque drawl.

Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro face off in this drug-fuelled thriller, and it's hard to work out who comes out on top in the story, or in the acting contest.

This remix album is a collaboration between Jamie Smith of hushed electronic rockers The xx and Gil Scott-Heron, the 1970s street poet and revolutionary rapper.

Rajendra Prasanna comes from generations of Indian master musicians. On Tuesday, thanks to him and his three colleagues, a rapt audience fell under the spell of a music in which time itself seemed almost to stand still.

As she grows older and hones in on the big issues of life, Joanna Trollope just gets better.