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All is Lost

JC Chandor’s second feature is a lean and gripping sea shanty: think Captain Phillips without the crew, dialogue or Hans Zimmer music score. Robert Redford plays the mariner of few words who wakes up one morning with his hull pierced by a shipping crate, welching on his decision to tag it with a sea anchor. What follows is divine punishment as the old seadog fights to keep his ship upright and his marbles in order, drifting without radio through a series of storms that require quick thinking and MacGyver-style maintenance remedies. The Leviathan camerawork puts the 77-year-old Redford through his paces, lashing him with everything the sea can brew up including nerve-wracking mast climbs and miles of empty ocean without a soul in it to help him. By the end, you’ll be crying salty tears.

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John Foxx and the Belbury Circle

Empty Avenues

  Parochial electronica label Ghost Box move into straight-faced pop with this hookup between founders Jim Jupp/Jon Brooks and revered electronic songwriter John Foxx. In six tracks they create a brand of bobbing hauntology, Foxx’s voice like Bowie when he wants you to hear him: the autumnal Suit with its beat colder than Vienna, the title track and its wooden percussion and tumbling keyboard melody. There’s still that signature Ghost Box weirdness - Time of Your Life is analogue psychedelia, the kind of thing Lord Summerisle might smoke a doobie to - while Almost There sees Foxx warbling to synth bass as he stalks a girl around his village. Intimate, cinematic but with beats you can nod your head to, Empty Avenues is the Miami Vice soundtrack successful transported to Pluckley.

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Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa

Not every British sitcom dies on the big screen: the long-awaited Alan Partridge movie is a lean but laugh-filled 90 minutes, outstripping The Parole Officer and 24 Hour Party People as cinema vehicles for Steve Coogan. Resisting the original idea of taking the character to the states, Alpha Papa sees Alan trapped in his booth after he gazumps rival DJ Colm Meaney, who returns one night with a poncho and a shotgun. Bullets and inane trivia fly as Partridge chats to save his life, juggles attempts to schmooze the station re-branders and sees if he can resurrect his long-dead TV career (all he had to do was give take his trousers down and give himself a fruit basket). A taut comedy-thriller with space for PA Lynn and nutcase ex-squaddy/voice of the meerkats Michael - and crucially, tons of quotable dialogue - Alpha Papa is as good a translation of the character as loyal and casual fans could have hoped for.

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Rick Redbeard

No Selfish Heart

“Don’t confuse somebody who lives each day like it’s his last” - the first of many wise words from Phantom Band frontman Rick Anthony, who makes his solo debut here as Rick Redbeard. When heading the Glasgow swamp rockers Anthony calls himself Richard The Turd, occasionally hiding behind a suit of armour while his band chug their way to oblivion. As Redbeard he’s stripped naked, just him and a guitar, writing timeless, hearty folk songs that could soundtrack a western (provided it was shot in west Scotland).

  No Selfish Heart is made of quiet, contemplative tunes, laced with shattering home truths but recorded in the front room of his mum’s house. Old Blue uses acoustic guitar, scratchy violins and Anthony’s sister on backing to echo the Bluetones, confirming all this will fade away (or in this case, “We will both turn into the sea”), while We All Float pulses out piano notes and images of inner frailty (“Eggshell hearts light enough to float/But so easily broke”). A Greater Brave and its twinkling guitar play and roadside imagery make it ideal for a rural romantic escape - if The Wicker Man had a love scene, one that didn’t involve Britt Ekland’s overdubbed singing or graveyard orgies, this would be the music.

  Despite its folky formula there’s enough inventiveness on No Selfish Heart to peg Anthony out as so much more than just a sad bloke with a plaid shirt. A cheeky but macabre storyteller, he slips in grotesque ideas by playing the instruments so gently you think you’re getting ambience, but instead get a piece of work like Any Way I Can. Frisking its way to a strong chorus through electric guitar, it shifts into something darker as Anthony realises the girl he’s serenading is a throat-slasher, singing a defiant “I’m gonna love you anyway” as she chokes the life out of him. If you’ve ever had a mate who won’t be talked out of a painful relationship, play him this and watch him embrace singledom. The lighter Now We’re Dancing and its tapping, hypnotic guitar gives us dance instructions hidden in the beat, while Clocks moves from drowsy dirge to beautifully overlapping organs, so evocative of a sunrise against uninterrupted landscape it could take you to Australia if you ignore the Aberdeenshire accent.

  No less potent than his hi-jinx with the Phantom Band, No Selfish Heart is a penetrating, genuinely heartfelt folk album, one that draws a square on the ground and doesn’t leave it. Glimmering with pearls of wisdom and spiced with outrageousness - on Cold As Clay (The Grave), we hear the lyric “The fools are nearly on us now; I see them with their flaming torches, their sharpened knives, their baying hounds and howling wives/And you are as cold as the clay on the banks of the stream as I lay down by thee…” yep, it’s a necrophiliac love song - it shows Anthony as maturing but still starkly honest songwriter, and also teaches you how you can get grisly murder stories onto Radio 2: by repeatedly slipping romantic bombshells and tearjerking pats on the back around your guitars like raindrops.

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The World's End

  The Three Cornettos trilogy comes to a sticky end with this forced sci-fi comedy from Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg. Pegg plays Gary King, a small town fuck-up who drags his mates back to Newton Haven for the twelve-pub marathon they never finished - and the Quink-filled androids they never expected. Nick Frost at last gets to act his serious chops off but the film’s strained, stumbling through excuses to hit the next pub and kick ass/swap chunks of robot exposition. A long, long way from the acid heart of Shaun of the Dead, The World’s End limps to a preachy finale and a closing shot that mirrors Mortal Kombat. Ouch.

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Black Mirror Season 2

  More future shocks from Screenwipe’s Charlie Brooker, who jumps into the DeLorean and takes us to 2013A. First tale Be Right Back stars Hayley Atwell as a widow who resurrects her husband by compiling his tweets, and uploading them into an empathetic, sim-free android. Being Human’s Lenora Crichlow fights for her life in Justice Park, where zombified strangers follow her and film her every move with iPhones. And in The Waldo Moment, Brooker targets himself as a muckraking animated bear who gets elected to parliament despite having no manifesto. Three streetwise and jet-black crystal balls that declare war on anyone who can’t let go of their smartphone.

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Man of Steel

  In this choppy take on Superman’s origin story, Henry Cavill puts on the tights after Brandon Routh got unfairly Lazenby’d back in 2006. When fracking causes his H. R. Giger-like world to explode, an English Russel Crowe puts his son on a missile and plots a course for Kansas, USA. Years later Amy Adams is on the trail of a fisherman who can apparently survive burning oil rigs - as is Michael Shannon's bug-eyed General Zod, freed from Krypton’s big bang thanks to a cryogenic prison sentence. Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan tell Kal-El’s story with city-trashing action and a sympathetic ear for his outsiderness, but not a single laugh, and only a piece of the heart that powered the Richard Donner movies.

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World War Z

  Brad Pitt co-produces this muddled epic that takes so many liberties with Max Brooks’ novel the French could build a statue to it. He’s Gerry Lane, a UN advisor forced out of retirement when an airborne virus unleashes the “technically undead”. His solution? Fly around the world like Lara Croft causing fresh outbreaks, and demonstrating questionable survival tactics (turn glossy mags into gauntlets, pull every Korean’s teeth out). Building to a Wales-set finale and a very confused Moritz Bleibtreu, Z is a strangely gore-free apocalypse, more focused on setting up a potential sequel and Brad’s Kurt Cobain-like hair.

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Kode9

Xingfu Lu / Kan

  It may have been floating around on YouTube for a year as a rip but the new single from Kode9 is now ready, free to be enjoyed without on-air quips from Scratcha DVA. Xingfu Lu begins with looping, scratchy high hats that flip over into shrieking fax noises, before getting jumped on by crunchy footwork beats and wailing arcade machines. B-side Kan is less complicated, with Goodman taking glass chimes, squealing kettles and low pulsing synths and shifting the emphasis from one channel to the other. Both tracks could square off in some exotic bass music competition, with Xingu apparently named after a jostling street in Shanghai. Go down it with a pram at your peril.

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Benin City

My Love

Formed in a squat and named after a Nigerian state capital, London four-piece Benin City have a skewed take on electronica, incorporating tenor sax, dubstep and a graduate from the Royal Academy of Music. My Love is the first taster from upcoming LP Fires In The Park and opens with rainsticks and hazy keyboards, over which vocalist Joshua Idehen serenades a girl with screamed facts, the tempo ratcheting up. Between the ranting and string section comes a mighty synth drop that's stabilised by blasts of horn and some painful self-truths (“My love is mine/It never lies/It will turn lead into dust”). With a video that features a stop-motion tour of the capital and a woman throwing tantrums in Kennington, My Love is a crazed, exciting burst of passion and an ideal first track for your morning run playlist.

  VIDEO:

http://t.co/iDtoPV3nes

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Ecovillage

Orange Sunshine

A Swedish shoegaze band endorsed by Ulrich Schnauss, Ecovillage are set to drop a new album on 6th May, and judging by this taster track it'll push their euphoric, choppy pop sound to new highs. Orange Sunshine takes the cleaned-up vocals of their last LP and combines them with glittering keyboards, deep, luscious bass and washed-out electric guitar - plus some obligatory wave effects to remind you how clean the beaches are over there. It sounds sickly sweet but Emil Homström and Peter Wikström are old hands at this now, anchoring their ideas to a chest-pumping tune and chucking in treats like the delicious pronunciation of “Oranje” and a wide-eyed unshakeable happiness. After eight years together Ecovillage are now so enthusiastic and harmonious they deserve to be branded the Bill & Ted of shoegaze (after they'd grown beards and learned guitar, that is).

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DJ Rashad

Rollin

  Footwork producer Rashad Harden bursts onto Hyperdub with this flawless, futuristic percussion-led EP, grafting his native Chicago sound onto the UK broken beat scene. Rollin shifts an R&B loop from channel to channel, the snares ticking by fast enough to induce epilepsy, while Let It Go wraps synths around a demented 8-bit riff and beats like someone shooting paint cans. The flipside brings in DJ Manny, who colours in the drum roll of Drums Please with squealing Theremins and descending keyboards, and DJ Spinn on the surly Broken Hearted, where vocals and staggered glass chimes manage the impossible and make those crazed snares seem introspective. Once again, proof that Hyperdub’s knack for spotting talent is so sharp they should be placed on meteor watch.

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Voltage Black

We, The Obsolete

  Quiet for a couple of years, Ewan Fisher of London has shot back with another helping of twisted, euphoric electronica. We, The Obsolete opens with tumbling antique synthesizers that will straighten out the whiskers of any Boards of Canada fans, clicking, cracking and bursting to life with whirling keyboards, anthemic bass and vocodered sweet nothings. Remixes include Fisher’s own Singularity Edit, which stretches the intro and slows the drop down so it hits you like alcohol, and an interpretation by Black Ph03nix where live drums and budget synths make the tune feel like a Van Halen number. Technology elitists, please take a pew: here’s proof you can make magic on hardware as commonly available as a calculator or musical greetings card.

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Robot & Frank

Jake Shreier's charming debut follows grouchy thief Frank Langella, at odds with the cold technology and fickle minds of future New York. He's going bonkers, but that changes when estranged son James Marsden gives him a VGC-60L: an Asimo-like android who undertakes butler duties and gets the old codger out in the world again. Frank soon has him helping out on man-size crasts, sizing up yuppie flats while the pair discuss the master's worsening senility. A heartwarming tale that'll please fans of Moon, or Black Mirror enthusiasts who fancy something a little lighter.

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Wreck-It Ralph

Anyone who’s ever read the words GAME OVER will find something to enjoy in this meta-tastic mash-up of arcade games. John C. Reilly voices Ralph, the ham-fisted stooge who’s tired of being the bad guy and tries to turn good - with disastrous consequences. Crashing his way through ‘80s and ‘90s platform adventures and aided by some violent modern shooters, Ralph has to fix the mess he’s made before he dies outside of his own game, crashing the whole arcade continuum. Sharply written, heartfelt and full of more Easter eggs than the chocolate aisle at Asda's, Wreck-It Ralph is a true first: a video game adaption that works.

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Haiku Salut

Tricolore

  Haiku Salut are three girls from Derbyshire who make “Baroque-pop-folktronic-neo-classical-something-or-other”, and who are every bit as cute as their name implies. They're also the most exotic sounding band currently on indie label How Does It Feel To Be Loved's roster, so anyone tuning in expecting the wooly guitars of Tigercats or Pocketbooks should be careful: Gemma, Louise and Sophie make the kind of sparky piano-led electronica that powered the first incarnation of Múm, and have already stirred up comparisons to Yann Tiersen after a scene-stealing live spot at Indietracks.

  One of their talking points - that the girls don’t sing - doesn’t mean they can sound any less whimsical than their counterparts on HDIF, and Tricolore is awash with reverie as potent as vintage Belle and Sebastian records. Los Elefantes’ melancholy piano score sounds like the serious bits from This Is England, and comes accompanied by a swarm of blips and plucked, Amon Tobin-style strings. The briefer Say It is a stripped back minute of tinkling ivories and skipping synths, while Leaf Stricken is a beautiful glitch instrumental, the crazed beats falling neatly in line around the piano and guitars without overpowering them, like a bedtime version of Aphex Twin’s Boy/Girl Song.

  But Tricolore isn’t all music for wimps, and occasionally the bulk of ideas put in by the girls gets to flex its muscles in full. It happens gradually but there are moments when Tricolore becomes outright club-friendly: the hazy accordion and banging glitch drums of Glockelbar, or II: Lonesome George (Or Well, There’s No-One Life) :II and its hybrid circus/flamenco music, just the job for trained animals who can operate a pair of castanets. These tracks don’t detract from the band’s inherent sweetness, and Sounds Like There’s A Pacman Crunching Away At Your Heart is their liveliest but cutest moment, taking a gentle accordion line and marrying it to drum machines and Pac-Man himself, flashing in chiptune glory while he chases away the instruments.

  It’s a rousing moment on an album which sees Haiku Salut significantly upping the tempo of the How Does It Feel canon without even uttering a word. However precious you thought this label was, forget it - they’ve found instrumental indie dynamite in the form of these three girls, who are able to take a simple glockenspiel arpeggio and make it beat like College’s Real Hero unplugged. Brimming with summery acoustic guitars, soaring accordion and emotive glitch beats - and a glorious firework display in the shape of pumping, Postal Service-esque closer No, You Say It - Tricolore is a giddy haze of a debut, opening doors to several subgenres the trio can confidently move forward in.

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The writer/director of The Edukators looks at the mental illness spectrum with this heartwarming, unlikely buddy movie. Peter Schneider is the mathematician who is fired because of a breakdown, and one day encounters orphan Timur Massold while out foraging for deposit bottles. Shunned by modern Germany they walk into a forest, where the genius sets up camp and begins to wonder whether his young friend and their encounters are actually just memories. A charming and thought-provoking look at dissociate disorder, and definitely the best film you'll see about a bean-counter finding peace under a wigwam.