Tomas (Franz Rogowski) is an intense and chaotic star, pulling people into his orbit and taking position at the centre of their lives.

Every musical cue from this is burned into my brain from dozens of VHS viewings as a kid. It’s an essential part of the canon of ‘70s–’80s children’s fantasy films that hid traumatisingly terrifying or unsettling scenes along with RETURN TO OZ and WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY.

Steven Beard (Eli Gabay) is the exemplar American man: extraordinarily wealthy despite having no apparent job and consisting on a diet exclusively of beef.

CORNER OFFICE taps into a specific niche of absurdism directed at the banalities of everyday existence that I associate with Scandinavian directors like Roy Andersson and Thomas Vinterberg.

It’s astonishing to me that this never looks nearly as good as Peter Jackson’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS films which were made over twenty years ago and, adjusted for inflation, with each film costing roughly the same as this.

It’s 2012 and Disney announces a SORCERER remake and sequels for APOCALYPSE NOW and FITZCARRALDO. SORCERER beat STAR WARS and New Hollywood dominates.

Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley pull out a three minute shootout scene from a standard action film and expand it to a full ninety minutes making every bullet impact important, every injury significant, and every movement a struggle.

There’s a sense of horror in the description of the ‘college campus’ atmosphere that these intelligent, liberal young scientists brought to the top secret military base where they were constructing weapons of mass destruction.

Christopher McQuarrie is a better Mission: Impossible director than screenwriter. Aside from this script’s unclear motivation for the antagonists and overreliance on rubber mask twists, McQuarrie’s bad habits emerge throughout ROGUE NATION and FALLOUT and come to full fruition in DEAD RECKONING PART ONE: the mythologisation of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) as global saviour figure; the self-sacrificing and vaguely cult-like nature of the IMF; the emphasis on ‘friendship’ as an emotional locus.

Within a three-month period in 1995, THE NET and then HACKERS came out: the Barbenheimer of 1990s computer-themed thrillers. THE NET has none of the joie de vivre of HACKERS and no amount of extreme close-ups on character’s mouths or computer GUIs can save it.