Truth Is Out of Style

Ran is Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's reinterpretation of William Shakespeare's King Lear. The Lear counterpart is an elderly 16th-century warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai), who announces that he's about to divide his kingdom equally among his three sons. In his dotage, he falls prey to the false flattery of his treacherous sons (Akira Terao and Jinpachi Nezu), while banishing his youngest son (Daisuke Ryu), the only member of the family who loves him enough to tell him the unvarnished truth. Thanks to his foolish pride, his domain collapses under its own weight as the sons battle each other over total control. Kurosawa's first film in five years, Ran had been in the planning stages for twice that long; Kurosawa had storyboarded the project with a series of vivid color paintings that have since been published in book form in England. The battle scenes are staged with such brutal vigor that it's hard to imagine that the director was 75 years old at the time. This 160-minute historical epic won several international awards, but it was not a hit in Japan, and it would be five more years before Kurosawa would be able to finance another picture.

C. Wright Mills was a radical public intellectual, a tough-talking, motorcycle-riding anarchist from Texas who taught sociology at Columbia University. Mills's three most influential books–The Power Elite, White Collar, and The Sociological Imagination–were originally published by OUP and are considered classics.

Since last September when we announced our collaboration with Billy Valentine, Bob Thiele Jr. and the Flying Dutchman label, with Billy’s peerless cover of Curtis Mayfield’s ‘We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue’, we have been looking forward to the moment when we could share more music with you.

Factual book, with a lot of amusing and unknown stories, giving a totally new perspective to the Stones.

Noted Hong Kong action director Johnny To spins this ultra-cool cat and mouse game between a very tenacious cop and a super thief with 72 hours to live. After brilliantly swiping diamonds from an insurance company, a master criminal (Andy Lau) inveigles Inspector Ho (Lau Ching-wan) into being his unwitting accomplice. Later, when the two confront each other, the thief has another trick up his sleeve.

Tom Courtenay gives a flawlessly nuanced performance as Billy Fisher, the underachieving undertaker’s assistant whose constant daydreams and truth-deficient stories earn him the nickname “Billy Liar.” Julie Christie is the handbag-swinging charmer whose free spirit just might inspire Billy to finally move out of his parents’ house. Deftly veering from gritty realism to flamboyant fantasy, Billy Liar is a dazzling and uproarious classic.

Composer Peter Dayton and Navona Records present STORIES OUT OF CHERRY STEMS, an album of original vocal chamber music with carefully curated texts spanning multiple centuries.