My favourite films of 2017 #10-1

Body snatchers: Daniel Kaluuya's Chris is in big trouble in Get Out

We've reached the final leg of our journey through my favourite films of 2017 and some of you are probably going to want to biff me on the nose for omitting certain movies from my top 40 list. Call Me By Your Name? Admired it more than I liked it – couldn't warm to either of the main characters. Good Time? Robert Pattinson's superb, but it isn't a patch on the Safdie brothers' previous movie, Heaven Knows What. Blade Runner 2049? Beautiful visuals but an unnecessary sequel that bored me to tears. Star Wars: The Last Jedi? Probably my favourite SW film since The Empire Strikes Back, but it only really clicked in the final hour. And that's the beauty of film – there are no right or wrong answers. Like what you like, watch what you want. As long as you enjoy it, it's really none of mine nor anyone else's business. That said, feel free to remonstrate with my choices in the comments. I have a thick skin, I can take it...

10. Personal Shopper
Director: Olivier Assayas  UK release date: 17 March
Kristin Stewart reunites with Clouds Of Sils Maria director Assayas for this strange and horror-inflected meditation on grief, loneliness and, quite possibly, madness. Stewart is Maureen, an American living in Paris and working as a general dog's body for Kyra, a ghastly celebrity model. She is also a medium, desperate to make contact with the spirit of her dead twin brother, who has passed away following a heart attack (she shares his condition). Maureen's life is sad and absurd; discussing ectoplasm-spewing spirits one minute, writing huge cheques for her employer's obscenely expensive outfits and accessories the next. A lengthy scene in which Stewart goes to London and back again on Eurostar, all the while exchanging texts with a mysterious person or entity, is Assayas at his most audacious.

9. mother!
Director: Darren Aronofsky  UK release date: 15 September
The year's most divisive film fully deserves its reputation as Noah director Aronofsky serves up a feast of religious allegory, radical green politics and Grand Guignol. Javier Bardem is Him, a poet who lives with his young bride, the titular Mother (Jennifer Lawrence), in a big, beautiful, isolated house she has renovated from scratch. Their seemingly idyllic existence comes under threat with the arrival of Ed Harris and his wife Michelle Pfeiffer, spinning out of control altogether when Lawrence becomes pregnant and Bardem attracts a cult following, who not only turn up at the house but move in and start smashing it up. And just when you think matters have got just about as unhinged as they can, we career into an hysterical final act that'll make you question your sanity (or Aronofsky's). Love it or hate it, mother! takes more risks than any film I've seen this year and nearly all of them pay off spectacularly.

8. I Am Not A Witch
Director: Rungano Nyoni  UK release date: 20 October
In I Am Not A Witch, Zambian-Welsh filmmaker Nyoni gave us one of the year's most startling feature debuts, which she wrote as well as directed. It's a surreal social satire set in the country of Nyoni's birth and focuses on Shula (Maggie Mulubwa), a nine-year-old girl accused of witchcraft, who is shipped off to a "witch camp" in the Zambian desert. The camp is populated with women of all ages and, like Shula, they have all been interned on spurious charges. Attached to a long white ribbon and bulky spindle, like the other prisoners, Shula is told if she ever tries to escape she will be cursed and transformed into a goat. She is soon noticed by a government official who exploits her supposed abilities to his own ends. Nyoni's target is the misogyny that exists in Zambian society, with an added wrinkle... witch camps are in fact real and she visited several in Ghana and Zambia during research for the film. Mulubwa gives a restrained performance well beyond her tender years, while Nyoni's writing is full of acerbic wit.

7. Moonlight
Director: Barry Jenkins  UK release date: 17 February
Jenkins' Best Picture Oscar winner is probably too subtle for its own good at times and it took me a couple of watches before his movie's considerable charms inveigled their way into my heart. But, once you get past those early doubts, Moonlight is a beautifully judged and entirely powerful piece of work boasting great performances (especially Naomie Harris, Mahershala Ali, and Alex R Hibbert), superb storytelling and seductive visuals. It follows the same African-American character, Chiron, at three different but crucial stages of his life – child, teenager and man – as he strives to come to terms with both a difficult upbringing (Harris plays his crack-addict mother, he has no father) and his sexuality. We've all seen moving love stories before but Moonlight is a rarity – an on-screen exploration of masculinity and homosexuality that is warm, intimate, and sensitive.

6. The Handmaiden
Director: Park Chan-wook  UK release date: 14 April
Sumptuous adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel, The Fingersmith, which relocates the action from Victorian England to 1930s Korea. As part of a criminal scheme, a young pickpocket (Kim Tae-ri), is sent to work for a Japanese heiress (Kim Min-hee) betrothed to her repulsive uncle (Cho Jin-woong). Instead of fleecing her employer, however, she falls in love with her and the two commence an affair. The Handmaiden is all about deception – during the film's three separate chapters, it time and again picks the pocket of your expectations. Park deliberately withholds information and skews perspectives, making for a discombobulating ride that keeps you on your toes every step of the way.

5. The Florida Project
Director: Sean Baker  UK release date: 10 November
Baker's follow-up to 2015's Tangerine (aka the movie filmed on an iPhone) is set in the Magic Castle, a Floridian motel just a hop, skip and a jump from the nearby Walt Disney World resort. Intended for tourists, it is also home to a great many low-income, short-stay families including, in this case, single mum Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her six-year-old daughter Moonee (Brooklynn Prince). Precocious Moonee spends her summer days getting into scrapes with her friends, Scooty and Jancey, while her mum desperately tries to make ends meet. The irony here, of course, is that the motel and its surrounding area is a wonderland of fun and frolics for the kids but a penniless nightmare for Halley. Likewise, the garishly-painted façade of the motels may make them look like part of the Disney empire but the grim reality is light years away. Baker's visually sumptuous film – which doesn't overly concern itself with matters of plot – makes you laugh, makes you think, and isn't afraid to break your heart too. Willem Defoe, as the motel manager, hasn't been this good in years.

4. Raw
Director: Julia Ducournau  UK release date: 7 April
"Visceral" is a word thrown around by film critics to describe any bit of old tat with some violence in it these days. It's a word that has lost its power through repetition but one that nevertheless fits this extraordinary French cannibal film like a bloodied glove. A teenage vegetarian (Garance Marillier) is made to eat a rabbit heart as part of her initiation at a veterinary college and soon develops a taste for meat, including the human variety. Ducournau's unsparing film can be viewed as a straight-no-chaser horror flick or a coming of age yarn about a young woman transitioning into dog-eat-dog adulthood, but it adroitly juggles many other themes too, including sexual awakening, teenage rebellion, and sibling rivalry. Those reports of walk-outs and fainting at its festival showings only tell half the story because, underneath its blood and guts, Ducournau's film has smarts to spare.

3. Get Out
Director: Jordan Peele  UK release date: 17 March
Anyone who only knows US comedian Peele from his part in 2016's limp cat comedy, Keanu, is likely to be knocked out of their seat by this whip-smart combination of horror and satire that tackles the notion that America, even under Obama, was ever a post-racial society. British actor Daniel Kaluuya is in a mixed race relationship with his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) and one weekend she takes him to meet her moneyed, progressive parents at their remote country estate. They're initially friendly but clearly uncomfortable in his presence and that soon gives way to something far more sinister. Peele (previously best known in the US for the Key & Peele sketch show) combines Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers to give us a startling piece of work that puts liberal white America under the microscope and really doesn't like what he sees there.

2. Manchester By The Sea

Director: Kenneth Lonergan  UK release date: 13 January
Excoriating, heart-rending drama starring Best Actor Oscar winner Casey Affleck as a grief-stricken janitor returning home to the titular Massachusetts seaside town following the death of his older brother. There he has to confront a terrible secret from his past whilst struggling to forge a path into a more hopeful future. Director Lonergan's sharp script balances the bleakness with occasional stabs of wry humour, Michelle Williams is dependably superb as Affleck's estranged wife, while the actor himself turns in one of 21st Century Hollywood's great performances. The scene in which the pair bump into each other in the street, and the full weight of their shared history and suffering bears down upon them, is not only extraordinarily moving but also genuinely upsetting.

1. Elle
Director: Paul Verhoeven  UK release date: 10 March
A provocative revenge fantasy of sorts which sees Isabelle Huppert's icy CEO, Michèle Leblanc, raped in her Paris apartment before commencing a strange and erotically-charged game of cat and mouse with her attacker. It's a divisive film that no one seems to entirely agree upon. Is it suggesting that women secretly enjoy the experience of sexual violence? Or is it an anti-rape statement skewering the male need to subjugate difficult, powerful women? For me, Elle entertains both notions, but seeks to discuss them as part of something else – the way in which his characters exploit, degrade and hurt each other on a regular basis, and how such behaviour ultimately coarsens and cheapens their relationships and society in general.

On the surface, Elle is only a short walk from the likes of Basic Instinct (director Verhoeven's 1992 potboiler, starring Sharon Stone), but it's a far more complex and rewarding work than that, helped enormously by Huppert's total immersion in one of modern cinema's most unreadable characters. Based on the novel Oh... by Philippe Djian, Verhoeven's film toys with viewers' expectations – at what point does Huppert's character Michelle really know the identity of her rapist? Is she telling the truth about a terrible incident from her childhood? Is she a sociopath and as much a villain as the man who attacked her? Ultimately, though, this is a film about violation, sexual assault being the most extreme form of that.

With one notable exception (Michele's son, Vincent, played by Jonas Bloquet), the characters here are all pretty ghastly – from the cheating husband of Michele's best friend to the gold-digging gigolo who moves in with her mum, from the sleazy meme guy in her office to Michele herself, a rape victim who, in her day job, is happy to develop, produce and sell a video game containing repulsive images of sexual assault.

The veteran Dutch director's point seems to be that his characters (and, by extension, we, the viewing public) step all over each other's needs and feelings so much, all the time, that it has become normalised – almost a default setting. Moreover, eventually, we come to not just accept it and expect it, but perhaps even to like it. A chilling thought upon which to end...

PREVIOUS WINNERS
2016 - The Witch (director: Robert Eggers)
2015 - The New Girlfriend (François Ozon)
2014 - Under The Skin (Jonathan Glazer)

My 25 favourite films of 2017 so far: Part Two #10-1

After yesterday's appetiser, here's the main course - my top 10 favourite films of the year so far. To be considered, movies had to have been released into UK cinemas between 1 January and 30 June 2017. Releases exclusive to VOD, Blu-ray and DVD did not qualify for inclusion.

10. Prevenge
Director: Alice Lowe UK release date: 10 February
Director/writer/star Lowe makes the tricky art of comedy-horror look easy in her filmmaking debut, shot when she was seven months' pregnant. She plays Ruth, newly widowed and bearing a child that exhorts her to take bloody revenge on those responsible for her partner's death. Yes, it's funny (Lowe earned her comedy chops on the likes of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, so how could it not be?) but Prevenge is also joyously grisly, at times channelling the likes of Rosemary's Baby and Andrzej Zulawski's deranged Possession to great effect. I can't wait to see what she does next. 

9. I Am Not Your Negro
Director: Raoul Peck UK release date: 7 April

Narrated by Samuel L Jackson, Peck's fascinating documentary about black novelist, playwright, poet and activist James Baldwin focusses mainly on an unfinished book - Remember This House - which was to feature his memories of three great black American leaders: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, as well as ruminations on US history. Baldwin - a startlingly brilliant orator and formidable intellect - knew all three men well and stood by horrified as one by one they met violent ends during the 1960s. As a result there's a mixture of anger and sadness in Peck's film, feelings perfectly articulated in Baldwin's oratory, particularly lines such as: "The story of the negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story." Bringing Baldwin's writing bang up to date, Peck shows us how that story hasn't got any prettier.

8. Personal Shopper

Director: Olivier Assayas UK release date: 17 March
Kristin Stewart reunites with Clouds Of Sils Maria director Assayas for this strange and horror-inflected meditation on grief and loneliness. Stewart is an American living in Paris and working as a general dog's body for a ghastly celebrity model. She is also a medium, desperate to make contact with the spirit of her dead twin brother, who has passed away following a heart attack (she shares his condition). A lengthy scene in which Stewart goes to London and back again on Eurostar, all the while exchanging texts with a mysterious person or entity, is Assayas at his most playful and audacious. 

7. La La Land

Director: Damien Chazelle UK release date: 13 January

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone can't sing or dance like Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds but this musical love letter to old Hollywood, romance and jazz is utterly charming. Gosling's a struggling pianist, Stone an unloved actress, but the pair's passion for each other acts as rocket fuel for their ambition and self-belief, much improving their career fortunes even as the relationship founders. Yes, it's corny and whilst Gosling and Stone certainly have chemistry, their actual relationship is oddly chaste. That said, the song and dance numbers are mostly terrific (especially the opener, Another Day Of Sun), and Chazelle serves up a bravura ending a million miles from the saccharine-fest I was expecting.

6. Get Out
Director: Jordan Peele UK release date: 17 March

Anyone who only knows US comedian Peele from his part in last year's limp cat comedy, Keanu, is likely to be knocked out of their seat by this whip-smart combination of horror and satire that has its sights firmly trained on the notion that, since Obama, America is a post-racial society. British actor Daniel Kaluuya is in a mixed race relationship with his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) and one weekend she takes him to meet her moneyed, progressive parents at their remote country estate. They're initially friendly but clearly uncomfortable in his presence and that soon gives way to something far more sinister. Peele (previously best known in the US for the Key & Peele sketch show) puts liberal white America under the microscope and really doesn't like what he sees there.

5. Raw
Director: Julia Ducournau UK release date: 7 April

"Visceral" is a word thrown around by film critics to describe any bit of old tat with some violence in it these days. It's a word that has lost its power through repetition but one that nevertheless fits this extraordinary French cannibal film like a bloodied glove. A teenage vegetarian (Garance Marillier) is made to eat a rabbit heart as part of her initiation at a veterinary college and soon develops a taste for meat, including the human variety. Ducournau's unsparing film can be viewed as a straight-no-chaser horror flick or a coming of age yarn about a young woman transitioning into dog-eat-dog adulthood, but it adroitly juggles many other themes too, including sexual awakening, teenage rebellion, and sibling rivalry.  

4. Moonlight
Director: Barry Jenkins UK release date: 17 February
Jenkins' Best Picture Oscar winner is probably too subtle for its good at times and it certainly took me a couple of watches before his movie's considerable charms inveigled their way into my heart. But, once you get past those early doubts, Moonlight is a beautifully judged and entirely powerful piece of work boasting great performances (especially Naomie Harris, Mahershala Ali, and Alex R Hibbert) and superb storytelling. It follows the same character, Chiron, at three different stages of his life as he strives to come to terms with his difficult upbringing and also with his sexuality. It's a delicate, low-key film, and I was therefore astonished - but delighted - the Academy gave it the nod over La La Land.

3. The Handmaiden
Director: Park Chan-wook UK release date: 14 April
Sumptuous adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel, The Fingersmith, which relocates the action from Victorian England to 1930s Korea. As part of a criminal scheme, a young pickpocket (Kim Tae-ri), is sent to work for a Japanese heiress (Kim Min-hee) betrothed to her repulsive uncle (Cho Jin-woong). Instead of fleecing her employer, however, she falls in love with her and the two commence an affair. The Handmaiden is all about deception - during the film's three separate chapters, it time and again picks the pocket of your expectations. Park deliberately withholds information and skews perspectives, making for a discombobulating ride that keeps you on your toes every step of the way.

2. Manchester By The Sea
Director: Kenneth Lonergan UK release date: 13 January
Excoriating, heart-rending drama starring Best Actor Oscar winner Casey Affleck as a grief-stricken janitor returning home to the titular Massachusetts seaside town following the death of his older brother. There he has to confront a terrible secret from his past whilst struggling to forge a path into a more hopeful future. Director Lonergan's sharp script balances the bleakness with occasional stabs of wry humour, Michelle Williams is dependably superb in a supporting role and Affleck turns in one of 21st Century Hollywood's great performances. You'll cry, you'll laugh, you'll cry some more. You'll carry on crying until you realise everyone in the cinema is looking at you...

1. Elle
Director: Paul Verhoeven UK release date: 10 March
An outrageous and audacious revenge fantasy of sorts which sees Isabelle Huppert's icy video game executive raped in her Paris apartment before commencing a strange and erotically-charged game of cat and mouse with her attacker. It's an incredibly divisive film that no one seems to entirely agree upon. Is it suggesting that women secretly like sexual violence? Or is it an anti-rape statement skewering the male need to subjugate difficult, powerful women? On the surface, Elle is only a short walk away from the likes of Basic Instinct (director Verhoeven's 1992 potboiler starring Sharon Stone) but it's a far more complex and rewarding work than that, helped enormously by Huppert's total immersion in one of modern cinema's most unreadable characters. Oh and, SPOILER ALERT, I think she knows who her attacker is from the moment she first lays eyes on him.

Finally, a few mid-year awards...
Best straight to VOD/DVD/streaming film: Macon Blair's I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore on Netflix.
Most pleasant surprise: Matt Damon is miscast as a grizzled mercenary and the quality of the CGI is variable but The Great Wall gives good blockbuster. 
Tip for the top: Julia Ducournau, the director of Raw (see #5), is going to be HUGE.
Worst film: Take your pick from Assassin's Creed or Power Rangers (although I'm yet to see Transformers: The Last Knight).
Biggest disappointment: Edgar Wright's Baby Driver is a lot of fun but hardly worth all those five-star reviews. See also Toni Erdmann.
Most ill-advised acting choice: Jake Gyllenhaal as a grotesque Aussie TV animal-wrangler in Okja. Ruined the whole film and reminded me of Robert De Niro's similarly OTT turn in The Adventures Of Rocky & Bullwinkle. Not a good look, mate. 
Wish for the rest of the year: That adult fans of comic-book movies finally start to engage their critical faculties and stop declaring every bit of super-powered tat that comes their way  "awesome" or "amazing".

Personal Shopper, The Love Witch, and Catfight: Your Week In Film (March 13-19)

Flair Witch: Anna Biller's mad magical oddity is a visual treat

This week's most noteworthy movie releases on DVD, Blu-ray, VOD, and in cinemas... 

The seemingly ubiquitous Kristen Stewart became the first US actress to win a French César award for her performance in Olivier Assayas's Clouds Of Sils Maria, and she stars again in the director's follow-up, Personal Shopper (cinemas from Friday) WWW½.

Stewart is Maureen, an American living in Paris and working as a general dog's body for a ghastly celebrity fashion model, named Kyra. She is also a medium, desperate to make contact with the spirit of her dead twin brother, Lewis, who has passed away some months before following a heart attack (she shares his life-threatening condition).

Only a hop, skip and a jump away from being a genuine horror, this is really about the emptiness of Maureen's life and the terrible absence she feels since her sibling's death. The movie opens in classic chiller tradition with the medium on her own in a supposedly haunted house, spooky tracking shots providing the requisite amount of suspense as she feels her way around in the dark. But it's really a metaphor for Maureen's day-to-day existence - barren, unfulfilled, scary, and perhaps even under imminent threat from the disease that cut down Lewis.

Stewart's Maureen is a desperate character - unable to leave Paris or move on while the possibility she might be able to contact her brother's spirit remains. Despite Kyra's superficiality and general awfulness, Maureen envies her simplicity and wealth. When Kyra is out of the country, Maureen tries on her clothes and sleeps in her bed, as if stepping into her employer's shoes (literally) for even just one night provides a welcome respite from her own existence, one in which even her supposed boyfriend (Ty Olwin) couldn't be kept more at arm's length as he works abroad.

I like Assayas, his films are the right kind of strange and he never does what you expect of him. I suppose his work can seem a bit cold and passionless but that approach works here. Personal Shopper has an elegiac quality in which post-Charlie Hebdo, post-Bataclan Paris has rarely seemed more foreboding (you'll see no shots of the Arc de Triomphe or Eiffel Tower all lit up in touristy splendour here). The director makes some odd storytelling choices too - a lengthy scene in which Stewart goes to London and back again on Eurostar, all the while exchanging texts with a mysterious person, who may or may not be the ghost of her dead twin brother, probably breaks every rule of modern filmmaking, but effectively ratchets up the suspense and finds a way to make the ping of a mobile phone genuinely sinister.

Stewart, meanwhile, continues to go from strength to strength, her intense naturalistic performances recently earning her favourable comparisons with James Dean. I feel sorry for anyone still judging her ability and career on the Twilight movies. At this point it's like dissing Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie based on your recollection of The Laughing Gnome. She's great here - as she was in Certain Women, which opened in the UK last week. Maureen is trapped, scared, shattered by grief and, following her twin's death, perhaps only half a person. In fact, the possibility of contacting her brother seems to be the only thing that keeps her upright and functioning. Stewart makes us feel every bit of it. Not with big emotional grandstanding, but often with no more than a haunted look, a pregnant pause or an exquisitely-delivered line.

Shop 'til you drop: Stewart reteams with director Assayas

American filmmaker Anna Biller is one of those multi-talented, and therefore profoundly annoying, people who seem able to turn their hand to anything. Not only did Biller produce, write and direct The Love Witch (DVD, Blu-ray, VOD and cinemas) WWW, she also made the costumes and sets, as well as painting the artwork which hangs on our titular spell-caster's walls. It wouldn't surprise me if she'd handled the catering and peddled a bicycle to make electricity to power the cameras too.

If I hadn't known it was a new film, I'd have sworn The Love Witch was a long-lost Technicolor oddity from the late sixties or early seventies - perhaps a Hammer Horror left at the back of the vault for some mysterious reason, or a lurid psycho-thriller deemed altogether too odd for wide release. Biller's painstaking attention to detail is a wonder to behold, although cinematographer M David Mullen, an expert on period cinematography, must take his fair share of the credit.

Elaine (Samantha Robinson) is a beautiful young witch, who relocates from San Francisco to a small Californian town following the demise of unfaithful husband, Jared. It soon becomes clear Elaine is responsible for his death and her quest for true love is about to claim a bunch of new victims. Using a dangerous love potion, she makes a series of local men fall head over heels for her charms but it isn't long before the bodies start to pile up and the police are on to her.

The 'love as mental disorder' theme is hardly new but Biller gives it a feminist spin here. Although Elaine is gorgeous and men fall over themselves to sleep with her, what she seeks is true love and someone who wants her for what she is rather than what they want her to be. If Elaine is truly mad, she's been driven to it by her suitors' need to exert control over her and their subsequent betrayal once they fail to do so. As messages go, it's a real iron first in a velvet glove, as Biller's seductive visuals and dream-like atmosphere lull you into a false sense of security. 

Arguing The Love Witch wears its influences on its sleeve a bit too much would be pointless - its evocation of period is deliberate and losing that element would rob the film of one of its great strengths. And, yes, it's also camp, pulpy and, at two hours, drags a little, but several beautifully-realised set-pieces - including an extraordinary sequence set at a Medieval Fayre - more than make up for any longueurs.

Spellbinding: Samantha Robinson captivates as the Love Witch

Even better than The Love Witch is Viva WWWW, which has recently been added to the ever-changing catalogue of oddities and classics at online streaming site, Mubi.com. This is Biller's debut from 2007 and shares the same love of period detail as the more recent film, as well as its sharp feminist edge. I spent most of the first half-hour wondering what on earth I was watching as Biller (playing frustrated housewife Barbi) exchanged deliberately stilted dialogue with three other characters while occasionally disrobing in something that looked a lot like a mercifully long-lost soft-porn comedy. Viva soon finds its feet, though, and in no time at all you're under its spell, as Biller takes a sledgehammer to cosy liberal notions that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and seventies was always a panacea for women. This is an incredibly smart movie, full of ideas, incredible visuals and even the odd song - all written by Biller, natch.

I'm rather less enamoured of Catfight (cinemas and VOD) WW, a pitch-black comedy in which veteran actresses Sandra Oh (Sideways) and Anne Heche (Donnie Brasco) beat each other to a pulp in three lengthy and utterly brutal scenes guaranteed to make you wince. Some of the violence is of the hyper-real cartoon variety but a good chunk of it is nastier and more realistic than that.

Writer/director Onur Tukel's film is a satire of petty status envy, anger and irrationality set in an America only a stone's throw from reality, in which the draft has been reintroduced and the 'War on Terror' has become a permanent money-making fixture for big business as the US military rides roughshod over the entire Middle East. Living in this all-too-believable dystopia are Heche, a bitter, impoverished artist and Oh, a boozy trophy wife. The pair were friends at college but drifted apart when the former came out as a lesbian. Years later they meet again at a birthday party at which Oh is a guest and Heche a waitress. Verbal barbs and sarcastic banter quickly give way to physical confrontation as the two proceed to knock the hell out of each other in a deserted stairwell. The fight leaves Oh in a coma for two years and she wakes to discover everything is different for both her and nemesis Heche...

The film - which makes an obvious but interesting correlation between the behaviour of a government and its citizens (in this case, "might is right" seems to be the maxim of both) - may have worked as a sketch or even a short film, but had delighted me quite enough by its halfway point. Heche, Oh, and Alicia Silverstone (playing Heche's lover) are always good value, though, and even manage to imbue Tukel's patchy, misanthropic material with a bit of humanity.

Welcome to the punch: Rivalry gets brutal in Catfight

Not much better but equally misanthropic is Nocturnal Animals (DVD, Blu-ray and VOD) WW, Tom Ford's cold, cruel and oddly distancing thriller which sees Amy Adams' successful LA gallery owner contacted out of the blue by an ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhaal), who she treated badly. He has written a lurid crime novel, the subtext of which provides a bitter running commentary on their failed relationship. We then see three separate stories play out - Adams in the present day reading the book, Adams and Gyllenhaal's past together, and the contents of the crime novel itself. It's an intriguing premise that the film never comes close to living up to, although Adams - plus supporting players Michael Shannon, Laura Linney, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson - make it worth a look, as does the film's smart, elliptical ending.

Altogether more fun is bonkers action thriller The Accountant (DVD, Blu-ray and VOD) WWW, in which Ben Affleck stars as an autistic maths savant who divides his time between forensic accounting and being an arse-kicking anti-hero hitman (or something). The whole thing is brain-manglingly absurd and uneven, but its breathless pace and the sheer brass balls of the premise just about haul it over the finish line.

What I shall be watching this week: Asghar Farhadi's Oscar-winning The Salesman, which is in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday.

Ratings guide
WWWW - Wonderful
WWW - Worthwhile
WW - Watchable
W - Woeful