The White Ribbon

After picking up a batch of folk awards, this Scottish five-piece have been touring the world with impressive results. Astar is Scottish Gaelic for “journey”, and this classy travelogue is remarkable for its variety of collaborations. The band is best known for featuring highland bagpipes along with fiddle, guitar, whistles and double bass, but this is Scottish-influenced global fusion. The bravest track, The White Sands of Jervis Bay, starts with a powerful ceremonial song from the Australian Aboriginal singer Yirrmal Marika from the Black Arm Band, backed by yidaki didgeridoo, then segues into a lament from fiddler Megan Henderson. On Muriwai, a jaunty pipe tune eases into a gutsy New Zealand Maori haka from Scott Morrison, while elsewhere there’s Quebecois fiddle from Olivier Demers and Norwegian hardanger fiddle from Olav Luksengård Mjelva, who contributes to an emotional treatment of Dick Gaughan’s on-the-road ballad Outlaws and Dreamers.

If John Ford is the greatest Western director, The Searchers is arguably his greatest film, at once a grand outdoor spectacle like such Ford classics as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950) and a film about one man's troubling moral codes, a big-screen adventure of the 1950s that anticipated the complex themes and characters that would dominate the 1970s. John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a former Confederate soldier who returns to his brother Aaron's frontier cabin three years after the end of the Civil War. Ethan still has his rebel uniform and weapons, a large stash of Yankee gold, and no explanations as to where he's been since Lee's surrender. A loner not comfortable in the bosom of his family, Ethan also harbors a bitter hatred of Indians (though he knows their lore and language well) and trusts no one but himself. Ethan and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), Aaron's adopted son, join a makeshift band of Texas Rangers fending off an assault by renegade Comanches.