entertainment

New release (Daft Life/Columbia)
Photo by David Black

In this era of electronic dance music, you might think the pioneering French duo Daft Punk would be eager to trump the upstarts. But you’d be thinking wrong.

As Thomas Bangalter told Rolling Stone, “We wanted to do what we used to do with machines and samplers but with people.” And as Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo said, “It’s not that we can’t make crazy, futuristic-sounding stuff, but we wanted to play with the past.”

Written and directed by Andy and Lana (formerly Larry) Wachowski (The Matrix trilogy) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), Cloud Atlas takes you on a mind-boggling odyssey through many ages and places that come together to make up the six-story tapestry of lives and previous lives, allowing many of the best actors in Hollywood and England to play multipl

Reacher (Tom Cruise) is an ex-lifer military police officer living off the grid. He agrees to become lead investigator for attorney Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike) who’s trying to keep a veteran sniper off death row since all evidence points to him having randomly shot five people.

New release (Fat Possum; tour dates)
Photo by David Raccuglia

Ready to Die is billed as the 40th-anniversary follow-up to 1973’s Raw Power because it’s the first album since then to be credited specifically to Iggy and the Stooges, with James Williamson returning on guitar.

The first Iron Man was an unqualified hit, featuring a terrifically witty and sly Robert Downey, Jr. The second Iron Man was merely tolerated because the first was so good. Good or not, the movies banked an impressive $1.2 billion in box office receipts. With that much money in play, a lot is riding on this latest release. Is the suit still strong, or has it become a rusty relic?