"He's good — who is he?" so say audiences watching the Brit newcomer playing Chaucer in A Knight's Tale and Russell Crowe's fantasy of an Oxford roommate in A Beautiful Mind. His name is Paul Bettany, and he is good. He's even better taking on the title role in Gangster No. 1, a potently in-your-face crime drama from first-time feature director Paul McGuigan. The movie has energy and danger and depraved wit. And it's all packed into Bettany's performance as the unnamed gangster in 1960s London who goes to work for the stylish hood Freddie Mays (a superb David Thewlis) and turns his boss into a role model and psychosexual obsession. The excellent Malcolm McDowell plays Gangster in the present-day scenes that bookend the film, but it's Bettany's portrait of the monster as a young man that rivets attention. So remember the name, or don't. Just watch Bettany strut his stuff. You'll know a star when you see one.

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."