At home tonight

CD
The Magnetic Fields
i
East West
****

If there was a genre known as the 'anti-love song', then Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt would be its greatest exponent.

As the title suggests, this latest album is specifically personal and the context improves the emotional power of his arch, barbed songwriting considerably.

Merritt's love life is as full of distrust, betrayal, indifference and ennui as the lives of those he has observed in the past, the difference being that this time he also allows himself both some vulnerability (I'm Tongue Tied) and, on It's Only Time, some of the most affecting sentiments ever committed to song. Claire Allfree

DVD/VIDEO
Girl With A Pearl Earing
Pathe Distribution, 12,
£19.99/£12.99
**

Peter Webber was brave to try adapting Tracy Chevalier's novel about a Vermeer painting; the book is all brooding silences, repressed feelings and emotive painting, none of which translates well to screen.

Scarlett Johansson is the maid brought into the painter's overcrowded, underfunded household; a glowering Colin Firth the artistic genius oppressed by money worries and an overly fertile wife.

It all looks beautiful but a little action would have gone a long way. With featurette, deleted scenes and director's commentary. Nina Caplan