We study the link between the complexity of polynomial matrix multiplication and the complexity of solving other basic linear algebra problems on polynomial matrices. By polynomial matrices we mean n x n matrices of degree d over K[x] where K is a commutative field. Under the straight-line program model we show that multiplication is reducible to the problem of computing the coefficient of degree d of the determinant. Conversely, we propose algorithms for minimal approximant computation and column reduction that are based on polynomial matrix multiplication; for the determinant, the straight-line program we give also relies on matrix product over K[x] and provides an alternative to Storjohann's determinant algorithm. We further show that al...