I'm a both a musician and a filmmaker, so I'm extra-picky about music documentaries. This one stands as one of the best visual representations I've ever seen of what it's like to be a musician.

Sure, it's shot on video, so don't expect the glorious black-and-white photography of U2's Rattle and Hum or Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz. Sure, the camera is often wobbly. But what director Adam Dubin does so well in this piece is capture the intricate details of recording an album, in Part 1. The setting was ripe for such exploration: This was shot during the crucial period when Metallica, then known as one of the most uncompromising bands in music, was first paired up with ace producer Bob Rock, known both for his crystalline productions and his rock-hard stubbornness. The ensuing conflict among band members and producer makes for endlessly fascinating viewing. Part 1 exhaustively explores every aspect of recording Metallica's eponymous 'Black Album' (obviously, you'll get much more out of this documentary if you know the album well). Highlights include Kirk Hammett's frustrating search for a solo to "The Unforgiven"; the battle between a sore-throated James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich; and a vocal session where you become intensely aware of just how much editing is required to put together one perfect lead vocal take. If you love music but have never immersed in this process, it's extremely illuminating -- it points out to you how the music comes into being. Plus you get three videos -- the casual studio-performance piece "Nothing Else Matters"; "The Unforgiven", a beautifully photographed expressionistic piece under director Matt Mahurin's lyrical, languid treatment; and the classic "Enter Sandman", a manic romp which stands as director Wayne Isham's crowning achievement.

Part 2 is a little more for fans. With its numerous live performances and less coherent structure, this part appeals more to longtime fans of Metallica who want to see how the band works when the scope of its fanbase suddenly increased tenfold. There are still fascinating bits even for casual perusers: The tensions between the Metallica/Guns N' Roses camps when the two bands joined up for a massive, trouble-ridden tour; an after-show meeting where the Metallica members discuss changes and critique one another; and backstage footage from the Freddie Mercury tribute concert. The two official videos, "Sad but True" and "Wherever I May Roam", are passable, with near-interchangeable footage and a distinct lack of character.

I used to put on my old VHS copy of Part 1 every couple of months just to delve into the terrific in-studio interactions of Bob Rock and Metallica. The release of both volumes of this video on DVD was a pleasant surprise to me, and anybody who wants to know more about the process of being a professional musician (and star) should check this one out. After seeing the amount of painstaking work put into each stage of the band's music, you might be less inclined to crucify Metallica for fighting against Napster.

Being a Shannon Wright fanatic, I could see this album was different from her previous works without hearing a note. Wright shows her face on an album cover? And the album title is actually comprehensible on first glance! The album credits continue to suggest a change in Wright's direction, featuring only two players in the lineup (Wright herself with drummer Christina Files, who had played with Mary Timony). Finally, Wright's previous albums had all been released one year apart from one another, so the two-and-a-half-year wait between Over the Sun and Dyed in the Wool is the longest she's taken between records ever since she'd gone solo.

But if the package and band are different, Wright's musical identity remains intact. Over the Sun is as twisty, difficult, and mysterious as any of Wright's previous works, and sonically continues in the direction of Dyed in the Wool, increasingly casting off the folkish, quiet introspection of Flightsafety in favour of the verbal and melodical mazes first glimpsed on Maps of Tacit.

You could say Over the Sun is Wright's art-rock record. Opening track "With Closed Eyes" continues in a tradition of powerful Wright album openers, featuring an insanely twitchy guitar line, funky and primitive, with a definitively pagan feel. "You'll Be the Death" puts folkish fingerpicking on eerie electric guitar, "Black Little Stray"'s guitar could have been a banjo part, and the talk-sing of "If Only We Could" is the closest Wright has ever come to punk rock. "Throw Your Blanket over the Sun" has the album's best vocal performance, weary and soulful, and the muted music and recording (best use of producer Steve Albini's sonic approach I've heard yet) seem to be attempting to conceal some great pain or turmoil.

Wright has been progressively moving away from overt melody and more towards textures, and on this record she's found the perfect partner in Albini and drummer Files. Previous drummer Brian Teasley had a powerful sound, but it was almost obnoxious and at times probably less subtle than the music could have warranted. Files' style is much more like Wright's own drumming, more subtle, focusing on feel and timing rather than Bonhamesque brawn, and is a better complement to Wright's sound and songwriting.

No Shannon Wright record ever yielded its full identity to me on first try, so I'm sure the complete impact of this record will also elude me until months from now. But Over the Sun is another daring, challenging, and idiosyncratic release from a musical genius whose experimentations are at once fascinating and overwhelming.

I knew nothing about Jen Chapin when I selected this record at a listening station at a store. Some intriguing instrumental touches grabbed me -- the funky, muted standup bass that opens "Numbers", the R&B-meets-Phil Collins groove of "Passive People" -- but I wasn't sure about how I felt about Chapin's voice.

Turns out all my issues with this record are with the vocal front. Chapin's voice is abrasive, unable to achieve any kind of warmth, mostly sounding aristocratic and arrogant. She has chops, but she always sounds like she's sitting high in judgment of the world, rather than in empathy and participation with it. She tries to write sociologically conscious lyrics, but her words feel forced, sounding like prose set to music rather than poetry, unlike the flowing verses of Suzanne Vega, for example. Maybe her Berklee training led her down more of a David Mamet lyrical direction (eg. Mamet's hyper-verbose, prosaic lyrics on Rebecca Pidgeon's The New York Girls' Club album), but it doesn't ring my bells.

This is still a minor point compared with Chapin's singing. The only way she can achieve warmth and humanity is by employing backup singers -- harmony singers Martha Redbone and Alan Burroughs sound great on "Passive People". Even in an ensemble, Chapin's voice grates, but not in a mighty, anthemic way like Grace Slick, but in an inexpressive, rigid manner no matter what the song topic. I appreciate the craft of this record, but I'm not impressed by its (lack of) emotional resonance.

Abra Moore's voice is very much an acquired taste. A taste I never acquired. It's girlish, often quite thin, and limited in its applications, usually unable to go beyond a sweet but somewhat generic girlishness. This severely limited my enjoyment of her last record, Strangest Places, and remains a problem on Everything Changed.

Her arrangements have grown, at least. "No Fear" is arresting in its dark thumping moodiness, and Moore actually finds a slightly more somber voice which at least helps diversify her sound. She uses her saccharine voice quite well on the open-road chorus to "Big Sky", and the heavily orchestrated "If You Want Me To" stands out thanks to its sweeping strings (sounds like a UK pop single) and a perfectly placed banjo line. Still, after seven or eight tracks, all the sweetness and light becomes tiresome, and you start yearning for more muscle in the topicality, more punch, more grit. And Moore's heavily reverbed voice becomes increasingly monotonous.

You might say looking for grit in Abra Moore's music is like looking for piano on a Metallica record. To a degree, that's true. At the same time, I think it's possible to do a mellow album without sounding toothless. Shannon Wright's Flightsafety, Sarah Harmer's All of Our Names and Neil Young's After the Gold Rush are great examples of records which succeed in a low-key, soulful way. Everything Changed, on the other hand, doesn't have enough substance behind it to be all that satisfying a listening experience.

I love Evanescence as much as about anybody, but I can't help but feel this single is a little thin in terms of its content. What you get:

A studio, band version of "My Immortal", which I hotly anticipated (having known about its existence from the Evanescence mailing list) but was disappointed in. It's not that it doesn't sound good. It's just I was expecting a truly radical rearrangement of the song to fit the band's array of guitars and hard-hitting backbeat. Instead, the full-band instrumentation seems to come as an afterthought, entering only before the final chorus. The rest sounds a lot like the album version, which also comes with the single. I don't feel like it's one of Evanescence's stronger tracks, finding it a little tame and preferring the dark, similarly spare (piano-and-voice) "Hello".

The live track "Haunted" has poor sound quality, sounding like there's a sheet of paper over the speakers. The best track on here is the last one, a live version of "My Immortal" which uses the full-band arrangement, and notable because of singer Amy Lee's soaring vocal, even more mature and resonant than her already formidable previous performances.

Still, this one's probably mostly for fans.

Since Chaplin was making dozens of shorts a year, it's easy to guess that not all of them are of the same quality. So it is with this collection. There are several must-owns on here, however, and they have been mastered well onto DVD with loads of extra materials, so this release remains essential in a Chaplin collection.

The two flagships for me are "Shoulder Arms" and "A Dog's Life". "A Dog's Life" was the first complete Chaplin film I saw, and it continues to delight me with its lightning pacing, masterful gags, and fascinating use of music -- the high-comedy bits still feature the merry scores of usual Chaplin films, but the main theme is a weepy, dramatic orchestral piece which, when juxtaposed against the famous Chaplin sight gags, are remarkably funny, almost perverse. Chaplin's physical skills are unparalleled in this film, with the "human puppet" sequence, the employment centre, the fight with the wild dogs, and the opening "roll with the cops" sequence being the highlights. "Shoulder Arms" was a brave stab at making the First World War funny and Chaplin succeeded grandly. Luckily, he also had the good sense to cut out an entire first act, seen here on the DVD bonus materials, which had little to no bearing on the story and isn't all that funny anyway. The trench gags in this film are fast and hilarious; though the "enemy territory" section drags a little, the film remains great.

The remaining films range from hilarious to just okay: I like "Sunnyside", which takes the Tramp's frequent dashes of unrequited love to a new level; but "The Pilgrim" wears out its central gag long before it's over, and "The Idle Class" and "A Day's Pleasure" are excruciatingly slow.

There are more films on these two discs than on the other Chaplin DVDs in this series, so there is slightly less bonus material to peruse. But there's still quite a bit, such as a propaganda film with Chaplin and Edna Purviance, and deleted scenes from "Shoulder Arms". It's always great to actually see deleted scenes from such old films. This DVD set is still a worthy addition to this impressive series of Chaplin reissues.

City Lights is widely recognized as Charles Chaplin's masterwork, and for good reason. It epitomizes Chaplin's blend of pathos and slapstick, grounding his physical comedy in real human feelings, taking the viewer on an emotional rollercoaster.

Though the setup may be considered overtly sentimental -- the Tramp's budding relationship with a blind flower girl -- the film's treatment of the relationship is heartfelt but never corny. Smart character details and interactions are the key: The scene where she mistakes a stray thread from his vest for a ball of twine, for example, or the beautifully orchestrated chain of events which leads to the incomparable ending, the greatest in the Chaplin canon. He never forgets the laughs as he takes you along, and it pays off handsomely in City Lights.

There are plenty of great gags in this film, my hands-down favourite being the centerpiece boxing match, an outrageous piece of slapstick with a great rhythm. Watch this after Raging Bull, for good measure. The botched suicide attempt by the drunk millionaire is also priceless.

Like the other releases in this series, the City Lights DVD is filled with extras, the best being an extended scene, edited out of the film, that features the Tramp locked in a battle of the wills against a wood shim lodged in a metal grille! The sequence features a hilarious turn by an actor playing a clothing-store employee exasperated by the Tramp's efforts. There's also remarkable screen-test footage of Georgia Hale, the luminous actress who had been in The Gold Rush, shot because Chaplin had been unsure of City Lights star Virginia Cherrill's abilities. Longtime fans of the film like myself probably can't see the point -- Cherrill's sweet face, expressive and disarming physical actions, and convincingly vacant eyes (according to the Chaplin biography, she was seriously nearsighted, a trait which had won her the role) were perfect for the role. Still, the shock to me was to see that Hale, when out of film makeup, looked very contemporary. It's amazing to see a Chaplin actress out of character like that.

A classic film in a package with all the trimmings. While this series has made some gaffes (the sound work on The Gold Rush, for example, and the Chaplin Revue disc actually mislabels the two discs!), it's obviously the work of people who are trying very hard to do justice to these films, and for the most part, they're succeeding in a way I haven't seen outside of the prestigious Criterion Collection. Congratulations and respect are in order.

Sarah Harmer has finally cast off her rockier edges and become a full-fledged folk-country artist. Nothing wrong with that -- it just means if you're more into the poppy, rocking Sarah Harmer of "Around This Corner", "Basement Apt." or her former band Weeping Tile's "South of Me", you won't find her on this record. However, if you're more into "Uniform Grey", "Judy G." or even her Songs for Clem persona, that of the low-key, soulful country crooner, this album will draw you in.

Harmer's voice has matured increasingly, dipping into a very low, husky register for "Greeting Card Aisle", featuring a lilting acoustic guitar that emulates a banjo roll (think Don McLean's acoustic picking), navigating her trademark falsetto-real voice shifts ever the more deftly in "Pendulums", harmonizing beautifully on the dreamy "Go to Sleep", and conveying heartbreaking vulnerability on the lovely "Dandelions in Bullet Holes". The most uptempo this album gets is on "Almost", and then the electric guitars are tamed by a subdued sound mix which makes them melodic rather than punchy.

The songwriting is rustic, relaxed, in no hurry to impress, and lacking in the sticky pop hooks of Harmer's pop songs, but remaining melodic and pleasing. She writes more earnest and less witty lyrics this time around and I miss the bite of her old lyrics, which lent an extra layer to Harmer's vocals.

All of Our Names is a very quiet album, one that you won't readily pick up for a long road trip or to help you wake up in the morning. It's beautiful and appealing, but I do miss the rock elements which had been vital to Harmer's artistic persona previously. As it is, All of Our Names is a fine record with no flaws, but compared to the more well-rounded balance of rock, folk and country on Harmer's previous records, this record comes off as a little bit tame.

Butterfly Boucher has a confidence of delivery and an ear for hooks which instantly make her stand out. Flutterby might just be the hidden gem of 2004 -- a good six or seven songs on this record sound like they could be rock-radio hits.

The great thing about this record is that while it contains many solid melodic hooks, there isn't a moment where it loses its rock balls. This is largely thanks to Boucher's resonant voice -- she doesn't have much range, but what she does have, she uses well, and she uses melodic twists to make her vocal lines always interesting. Boucher knows how to use weird chord progressions, such as on "A Beautiful Book", "Don't Point, Don't Scare It" and the piano-driven "Never Leave Your Heart Alone", a good example of how to sing a ballad without sounding anemic. The instrumental performance, largely by Boucher herself, is innovative, heavy on groove and full of attention-grabbing touches -- the twitchy guitars which open "Busy"; the aggressive acoustic strums of mighty leadoff track "Life Is Short" (brilliant use of dynamics on this track); the classic-rock guitar riffs of "Can You See the Lights?", the track that turned me on to this record; the cascades of glistening guitar on the anthemic "Another White Dash"; and the aforementioned "Don't Point, Don't Scare It" has Boucher's most soulful singing over an almost Renaissance guitar arrangement,

This record reminds me of another artist who had burst out of the gates with a flourish: Melanie Garside. Like Garside's first record Fossil, Flutterby is filled with great performances and superb songwriting. These songs sound like they would work equally well in a solo piano/guitar setting, and that's saying a lot. Add that to the terrific arrangements, and you have a candidate for an instant pop-rock classic.

After the emotional wreck of a masterpiece that was Bullet in the Head, director John Woo rightfully felt the need to loosen up. Hence this fluffy, downright silly, often enjoyable caper movie that merges the casts of The Killer (Chow Yun-fat, Kenneth Tsang, Chu Kong) and A Better Tomorrow (Leslie Cheung) while carving out a broad comedic tone that harkens back to Woo's older, lowbrow slapsticks (Plain Jane to the Rescue, From Riches to Rags).

Chow Yun-fat has a field day in this film, hamming it up as "Cupcake/Joey" (depending on your translation), a master burglar who becomes wheelchair-bound in a job gone wrong. Some of the gags are quite forced, but when Chow is given a chance for physical comedy in the wheelchair, he's a lot of fun. Leslie Cheung anchors the film as the acrobatic Jim, who is both Chow's best friend and his closest competitor for the affection of "Red Bean/Cherie", their sister-in-crime. Kenneth Tsang's character is pretty ridiculous, though the veteran actor does his best, but the surprise delight is seeing Chu Kong, so deadly serious in The Killer, loosen up to play a kindly but none too bright cop who takes the three young people in as proteges. Woo's action choreography is dazzling as ever, and far less violent than his usual works (though still pretty high in body count compared with American action-comedies), and the best set pieces of this film (the card-throwing punk, the centerpiece second heist featuring a lot of explosives) are high entertainment.

This DVD edition has been out for some time and it took me this long to check it out -- the packaging just doesn't inspire confidence. The contents herein partially affirm this suspicion. The transfer is clean, and it's great that they included the Cantonese dialogue track as an audio option. But there's something wrong with the sound mix; the music is far too loud, often drowning out the Cantonese dialogue, and I know from an old VHS copy of this film I own that the original sound mix didn't have this problem. There are also nearly no bonus materials, just trailers. It's probably harder to find bonus materials for Hong Kong films, and perhaps it's unfair to compare this to the multitude of features on the Criterion releases of The Killer and Hard-Boiled, but nonetheless, the special materials are out there in the vaults. Later UK releases of Hard-Boiled and The Killer do have added materials for us to peruse. So it's a matter of hunting it down and including it.

An adequate DVD for a problematic but mostly enjoyable film.