In the depth of his drunken despair, Tank (Julian Mayfield) stands in front of a carnival mirror and gives a funhouse description of the Black revolution to some credulous rich white people.

PHANTASM resonates with a specific Lynchian frequency while also operating with a Buñuelian sense of dream (nightmare) logic. It almost seems to anticipate elements of Lynch’s DUNE, BLUE VELVET, and Twin Peaks and shares Lynch’s preoccupation with the weirdness of the American suburbs.

Look, I’m not a stickler about spoilers and often think hysteria about spoilers is ridiculous but I feel I would have gotten more out of this if Amazon Prime Video’s description wasn’t a concise summary of the last five minutes of the film.

Continuing a series of films about deeply frustrating German men. Leon (Thomas Schubert) is always watching people from a distance and talking to them through windows accentuating the gulf he perceives between himself and other people.

A relatively grounded—for Quentin Dupieux—meditation on ageing and rejuvenation via two interconnected stories. ‘Grounded’ here involves a time-defying tunnel in a basement and an electronic iPenis but still more verité than Dupieux’s RUBBER or DEERSKIN.

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.