Alexander Stuart

For anyone who has any doubts about Lana Del Rey's hauntingly broad range of talents, here are two songs and videos that capture the beauty of her voice and presence at its most vulnerable and simply moving. Chelsea Hotel #2 is a Leonard Cohen song that Lana Del Rey sings even more beautifully than Cohen (and I love Cohen), bringing to it the strange kind of frailty that Lou Reed brought to songs like Perfect Day (both Cohen and Reed videos are below.) The second Del Rey song is Black Beauty, from her album Ultraviolence , made all the more beautiful here by the "fanmade" music video by Peter Tatsis, which features vintage footage of female dancers (along with footage of Del Rey herself, from other videos) which in its own way is as haunting as Lana Del Rey's tender song and voice. Lana Del Rey's music now strikes me as comparable in a sense to early Bowie: enormously varied, hugely accomplished and at the same time the beginning of a long wonderful

As I write today, I'm thinking about the first time I saw Francis Ford Coppola's truly extraordinary Apocalypse Now - at a preview of its original release - and the unbelievable thrill of hearing the sound of the chopper blades moving around the cinema, and the extraordinary, hallucinogenic flow of images that washed across the screen - and a narrative that was both visionary and experimental, yet grounded in fabulous storytelling - with, of course, a powerful element at its core of Joseph Conrad's already remarkable The Heart of Darkness. Along with Nicolas Roeg's Performance and certain other films, Apocalypse Now was one of the movies that cemented both my belief that cinema could be GREAT and mind-challenging and provocative and enjoyable and thrilling beyond belief - and BEAUTIFUL - and also one of the movies that made me want to make movies, to aspire to make something as great and as fearless - it certainly was in my mind (there's a direct refere