The House That Jack Built (2018)

Grisly murder is not the spectacle it used to be and no matter how hard tryhard provocateur Lars von Trier tries to match, say, Twitter/X in its ability to parcel out sudden, unexpected visual depravity, injecting increasingly shocking crime into his rehash of Nymph()mania (that's what this simply is, a third chapter, like the director is stuck on an idea, with Charlotte Gainsborough's Joe replaced by Matt Dillon's Jack, and her sex swapped with his serial murder; the languorous voiceover remains), the net effect of this heavy-handed and really quite silly movie is inanity.

★★☆☆☆

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The American Friend (Der Amerikanische Freund) (1977)

Wim Wender's take on Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley is to have Dennis Hopper saunter around Hamburg in overalls, a cowboy hat and a Willy Wonka haircut, but if you can get past this incongruity and accept Dennis Hopper's sharp edges and surface madness in place of the literary Ripley's sophisticated sociopathy, there is lots to enjoy about this story of a sick man coerced into a series of murders and who ends up with a strange new friend and abettor.

★★★☆☆

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The Reader (2008)

*SPOILER ALERT*

Don't believe the poster: this is a very dreary drama, not a provocative thriller, that asks audiences to sympathise with a paedophile serving life in prison for war crimes she considers less abhorrent than illiteracy.

★★☆☆☆

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