Maigret's Night At The Crossroads (2017)

Perhaps Rowan Atkinson was trying here to present an especially sad Maigret given the story opens upon the funeral of a police colleague, but he is so flat, so deadpan, so morose - even more so than usual - that this episode of the usually thrilling 2016 and 2017 Maigret series is the rather flat and ponderous one of the four - at some points you wonder if the actors are speaking as slowly as they are just to try to stretch the story to movie-length and this lethargic pacing is at odds with the outlandish characters, one of them scarred and hissing like a Bond villain and another a stammering cartoon who do not fit well against the backdrop of gritty Paris and its mid-50s period detail.

★★☆☆☆

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Dissonance (Méprises) (2018)

This low budget thriller from Belgium is not about big shocking twists but rather has a plot that keeps gently folding back on itself so that scenes you've seen, sometimes multiple times, are shown again but only very slightly tweaked - from a different camera angle or from the perspective of a different character, offering up a slight extra detail that elucidates an earlier ambiguity - and the effect is that the rather nasty story at the movie's heart, about a married woman's affair and her husband's reaction to it - like a Grimm fairytale played out for realsies - keeps a gentle hook in you, making you certain to watch to the end where again a little extra piece of information tweaks, doesn't earthshake, the whole.

★★★★☆

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Double Lover (L'Amant Double) (2017)

Like an add-on chapter to David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, one that no-one wanted or asked for, this François Ozon movie tells of mentally fragile Chloe's therapy sessions (read 'sex sessions') with a pair of pouty Calvin Klein-model psychotherapists - twins - and is a movie that quickly forgets that one of the twins that Chloe marries - the dowdy cardigan-wearing one - is driving her crazy with his secrets - but that must have been just to progress the story because lickety-split and before you can say, "This is not going to end sensibly," he reverts to being a model citizen, no hint of a lie, while she starts a torrid affair with the twin brother - the wild one with smart shirts unbuttoned to expose a hard, hairless chest - and from that point, things start to make less and less sense with the movie's raison d'etre simply being repetitive sex scenes including a centrepiece involving both brothers.

★★☆☆☆

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