Seeing a band as good as Mindless Self Indulgence at a half-capacity backwater club on a Tuesday was a rather odd, unexpected experience; a bit like finding out that Led Zeppelin are playing a reunion gig in your understairs cupboard.

As I watched frontman Jimmy Urine (possibly one of the most over-the top, charismatic lead singers I've ever seen) I began to wonder: why the hell isn't this band absolutely massive? Why wasn't their last single Shut Me Up - easily one of the catchiest songs I've heard all year - played constantly on the radio? Why are they supporting the cretinous My Chemical Romance when they should, if karma existed, be headlining?

Their gig was frenetic, funny and mesmerising - if they were fazed by the less-than-packed room that confronted them as they took the stage, they certainly didn't show it. They played like it was the last night of a stadium tour, tearing through each breathtakingly short song with hypnotic, almost sinister energy.

After what seemed like ten minutes of ranting vocals and staccato, machine gun-like drum patterns, Jimmy Urine abruptly concluded by miming along to a recording of 'There's No Business Like Show Business' with his trousers round his ankles.

MSI, while hardly an underground band, deserve a larger audience, and their current tour may just allow them to get one - judging by the footage I've seen of My Chemical Romance's dreary live performances, MSI might end up poaching a lot of their fans...

Radiohead's last few albums, a kind of odyssey into experimental prog-rock weirdness, divided critics and fans alike.

I for one didn't blame them for wanting to get away from the 'next U2' tag they were saddled with at the end of the nineties - they could have so easily fallen into a Coldplay-style cycle of radio friendly stadium rock twaddle, and after a few listens Kid A (their first 'experimental' album) turned out to be both unique and rewarding. Their next, Amnesiac, was equally good (Pyramid Song was my favourite track), but by the sixth, Hail to the Thief, the experimental style didn't sound quite so experimental anymore.

If you've been watching the news, you'll know that their seventh album, In Rainbows, became available to download today from Radiohead's official site, and has caused a bit of a stir thanks to the band's unusual pricing policy - fans can choose how much they want to pay for it. I won't say how much I paid for my download, because I'm far too ashamed at my miserliness (but it wasn't a lot more than you'd pay for a can of Coke) and having given it the first couple of plays, I really wish I'd paid more - it's excellent.

While still not as commercial as The Bends, the new album is a return to a much more band-oriented sound; the synths and drum loops have been replaced with live percussion and instruments, and is all the better for them; the third track, 'Bodysnatchers', features a great, cacophanous Johnny Greenwood guitar hook; the hypnotic 'nude' contains some beautiful strings; the final track 'Videotape', understated piano.

Thom Yorke's voice is as soothing, melancholy and bittersweet as it always was, and if anything sounds even more emotive against the more human, 'analogue' backdrop.

The album's clearly been a bit of a labour of love for the band - it's been four years since their last release - but the effort (and the wait) has been worth it - 'In Rainbows', even from the first listen or two, is very clearly a superb, important album.

Anyone hoping that Radiohead would return to their 'Creep' mode of songwriting will be disappointed, but fans of their later material will love this - in my opinion their best album since OK Computer.

Radiohead – if you're reading this, I owe you some more money!

As much as I love French cinema, sometimes their movies can sometimes be a little bit on the slow side. So imagine my surprise when this film turned up (a film I knew nothing about), which turns out to be a police action thriller firmly in the Michael Mann 'Heat' tradition.

Daniel Auteuil (brilliant in Caché) and Gérard Depardieu (brilliant in lots of things but definitely not Greencard) star as a pair of grizzled, hard-drinking cops in a tense, exciting thriller about corruption and revenge.

Auteil and Depardieu are lawmen working for two rival police divisions. They're both after the same criminal gang, and both after the same job as Chief of Police. As the film progresses, both characters become increasingly amoral as they compete to catch the perpetrators - it is only towards the middle of the narrative that Depardieu is finally revealed to be the true villain of the two, when he deliberately gets Auteil sent to prison.

The action scenes are short, sudden and impressive, but the true fireworks come from the two lead actors' typically excellent performances; Depardieu in particular is fantastically loathsome and despicable. Their superior acting more than makes up for the rather clichéd characterisation (it's difficult to recall a thriller of this kind that doesn't feature alcoholic cops with troubled marriages), and occasionally contrived plot, which towards the end appears to borrow elements from Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo.

Heat is one of my favourite movies of all time, and surprisingly 36 doesn't pale in comparison - largely because of the superb central performances and the solid, brisk direction from Olivier Marchal (himself a former policeman) carry the film so well.

Overall, a fantastic - though not perfect - entry in the police thriller genre. I just pray that Hollywood don't try to remake it...

Max: 'Careful. It bites.'
Bianca: 'You watched it?'
Max: 'Yeah. It changed my life.'

When Cronenberg wrote the above exchange (taken from the 1983 film Videodrome starring James Woods), he could easily have been talking about his own films. Cronenberg films have teeth.

In the run-up to the release of his latest film, Eastern Promises, an interview with the director appeared in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine (curiously titled ‘Gentleman’s Relish’ 6 October 2007). The interviewer asks, to Cronenberg’s understandable annoyance, ‘[Have you] always been obsessed with the relationship between sex and violence?’

Why, when a gigantic proportion of Hollywood’s output is mindlessly violent, do interviewers constantly describe his films as “sick” and famously (apropos Crash), “beyond depravity?”

What disturbs people about the violence and horror in Cronenberg’s films is the philosophy that lurks behind it. A director like Eli Roth can base entire films around people being graphically tortured to death for the audience’s titillation, but they fail to get under the audience’s skin because they have no purpose other than to shock and entertain. When Cronenberg makes a film like Crash, a film that deals with sex and violence with considerable restraint, it causes outrage. His films seem to reveal aspects of the human condition that certain people would rather not see.

Like Jonathan Swift, Cronenberg’s aim appears to be to ‘vex the world, not to divert it.’

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that, even today, with violence everywhere, both in the media and in the cinema, journalists are still insisting (quite wrongly, in my opinion) that ‘his movies would sometimes benefit from suggesting more and showing less.’ His latest film, Eastern Promises, containing, as the Guardian puts it, ‘three of the bloodiest scenes movie-goers are ever likely to see’, goes on general release in the UK on October 26th, and by all accounts, the director hasn’t lost his bite.

I often think back nostalgically to the days of straight-to-video movies. In the days before Lovefilm and Blockbuster, my local off-licence used to have an entire wall devoted to dodgy low-budget action movies starring people like Chuck Norris. These films were almost always the same; terrible acting, gratuitous violence, swearing and nudity and plots that made no sense.

Now that videos are dead and Chuck Norris has (possibly) retired, these terrible, yet highly enjoyable films have migrated to our multiplexes in the guise of features like Shoot 'Em Up and Deathproof.

Shoot 'Em Up sees the always-watchable Clive Owen blast his way through a cast of bit-part actors and villain Paul Giamatti with a gun that (John Woo-style) never runs out of ammo.

Owen plays the misanthropic Smith, who somehow ends up protecting an orphaned new born baby from Giamatti's quixotic assassin. Italian actress Monica Belucci (who can barely pronounce a word of her dialogue) plays the predictable love interest. Shoot 'Em Up takes the term 'cartoon violence' to new levels of absurdity; in fact, the film seems to be inspired by the Warner Brothers school of animation - Owen is essentially Bugs Bunny (who finds a disturbing use for carrots) to Giamatti's Elmer Fudd. The film starts with a huge shoot out and the action rarely lets up for the rest of the running time; Owen shoots at everything that moves and a lot of inanimate objects too.

Refreshingly, Shoot 'Em Up doesn't outstay its welcome. Unlike, say, Die Hard 4.0, it doesn't waste an hour with boring dialogue or pointless exposition, and instead concentrates on presenting one ridiculously violent scene after another. Characters even hold conversations while shooting at one another to save time. Very economical.

Shoot 'Em Up is a quite difficult film to criticise, because it's intentionally bad - the dialogue is awful, the plot is ridiculous and makes very little sense - but viewed in the right frame of mind it's a lot of fun. Owen and Giamatti clearly enjoy themselves, the latter making a surprisingly entertaining villain.

Compared to the ridiculously overblown Diehard 4.0, Shoot 'Em Up - which is half as long and probably cost half as much to make - is at least three times better.