Parky at the Pictures (DVD 6/4/2017)

There's little hint of the depravity to come in the opening sequence, as bedraggled vagrant Noé Hernández lugs a bundle on his back and starts pouring ingredients into a still that he keeps in an abandoned building in an unnamed Mexican city. He smashes a table for firewood and luxuriates in the feel of the mulch between his fingers. Eventually, he pours some of the liquid on the floor and ignites it with a lighter. He places a bottle of this homemade gas on a small trolley, which he pushes through a hole in the floor and he is rewarded with a large carton of eggs.

Treating himself to a slug of potion from a pipette, Hernández falls into a deep sleep and wakes to bang a drum while the camera performs a 360° axis turn that is cross-cut with shots of Hernández smashing objects in his lair before passing out with the drum on his head. He is found in this state by youths Maria Evoli and Diego Gamaliel, who smash through a trap door and wander round their new surroundings with a hooch-fuelled sense of wonder. They drag Hernández to a bed, which Evoli uses as a trampoline until their puckish host wakes and fixes them some eggs.

He agrees to let them stay, but locks them in their room and Gamaliel tries to convince Evoli to leave. But she is intrigued by the older man and readily helps him erect a wooden structure whose joints are bound together with masking tape. She asks Hernández if has always been alone and he gives her an elaborate answer that culminates in a confession that he has surrendered himself to the charms of Solitude, as she enabled him to face his darkest fears.

While Evoli warms to Hernández and develops a secret code involving wetting her forefinger on her tongue, Gamaliel remains suspicious. Tired of eating eggs and sticking down cardboard boxes over the wooden frame, he steals the pipette. Hernández continues to goad him and mocks him for having an unrequited lust for Evoli, even though she is his sister. She also teases him about his long eyelashes and tries to kiss him as they rest in her sleeping space.

But Hernández runs out of patience with Gamaliel and orders him to eat his steak at suppertime, even though he has already told him he is vegetarian. He does as he is told when Evoli begins foaming at the mouth and Hernández insists he will only give her an antidote to the poison she has ingested if Gamaliel cleans his plate and returns the pipette. Fighting down his revulsion, Gamaliel guzzles the meat as Evoli goes into a twitching fit. But Hernández brings her back from the brink with a sadistic grin.

Troubled with insomnia, Hernández starts babbling about gas and cities and wanders into the cardboard chamber, which is glowing with a ruddy orange light. He invokes the spirit of his mother and curses her for bringing him into this hellish world before picking up the slumbering Evoli and promising her that they will live in a glorious isolation that will allow them to be reborn. Cackling with malice, he accuses Gamaliel of lacking the courage to sleep with his sister and he orders them to remove their white overalls and stand naked in front of each other.

Hernández tells Evoli to fellate Gamaliel and, as though in a trance, she kneels before him. When she looks up, however, she sees Hernández leering down at her. Yet she continues to obey him and lies down passively, as the aroused Gamaliel stands over her. A sudden shift to thermal imaging is accompanied by a glutinous pop song as Gamaliel penetrates his sister. This view lasts for a couple of minutes, as the passion and intensity of the coupling is intensified by the lurid colour scheme. But the previous perspective is restored as Hernández begins to pleasure himself, while spouting platitudes about love.

Such is the force of his ejaculation that Evoli and Gamaliel convince themselves that Hernández is dead. They drag his body into their room and haul their mattress into the master bedroom, where Evoli annoys her brother by rolling into him off a cardboard incline. She rummages through Hernández's meagre belongings and finds a tattered snapshot of what she presumes to be his mother. But she remains bored and coats herself in oil in a bid to seduce Gamaliel, who pushes her away before sidling off to masturbate in the corridor while fantasising about his sister. Some time later, Gamaliel wakes to find Evoli lying beside him. She demands to know how much he loves her and straddles him to drip menstrual blood on to his tongue. He acquiesces as she declares that there is no such thing as love, only demonstrations of love. Seemingly in a daze, Evoli wanders naked through the building and uses her fingers as a gun to shoot the diminutive woman from the photograph. She sits on a ledge in the cardboard chamber as the light changes to red and, as the camera glides through a 360° pan, Gamaliel is shown sitting in a yonic alcove before the scene cuts to close-ups of the siblings' genitals.

Evoli wakes wearing Hernández's helmet and she mounts his corpse in an effort to reanimate him. Muttering that it's impossible to look steadily at the sun and death, she traipses into the corridor to urinate. On returning to the side room, she caresses Hernández's corpse and is horrified, after stepping outside for a while, to discover that it has disappeared. As she rushes to inform Gamaliel, a blue light fills the room and a clean-shaven Hernández bursts through a cardboard wall and rolls across the floor in a puddle of amniotic fluid. Struggling to his feet, Hernández begins to grin and gyrate to a pop song. Overjoyed at his resurrection, Evoli straddles him and makes him promise never to leave them alone again. He claims they are now a family and even Gamaliel joins in the group hug.

In order to celebrate, they venture into the wider world to abduct soldier Gabino Rodríguez, who is brought bound and gagged into the hideout. Hernández uses the pipette to tend to what looks like a bullet wound in Gamaliel's temple before turning his attention to the hostage. He reassures Rodríguez that he has been chosen by Chance (whom he describes as the biggest criminal in history), as ideology, pleasure and revenge are unworthy motives for slaughter. Rodríguez struggles as Hernández explains that he wants his blood, flesh and precious bodily fluids and takes the opportunity to scream when his gag is removed. But he calms down as they sing the national anthem and meekly accepts having his throat cut and Evoli strokes his hair as gore cascades into a bowl.

As Evoli feeds the blood to the recuperating Gamaliel, Hernández makes a pulp out of the innards. He is disturbed when Evoli arrives with María Cid, who has been lured into the den by the promise of food. Evoli forces her to drink from the pipette to suppress her appetite and begins kissing her. Against her instincts, Cid starts to respond as Evoli undresses her. But she resists as Gamaliel takes over from his sister, who begins to masturbate with a frenzy that sees her body seem to distort before she looks up to see an unfamiliar face and screams.

A leering Hernández jokes that this `is not your average party' as he welcomes the guests celebrating his name day. He announces that he wishes them to consume his body and an orgy ensues to the accompaniment of Bach's `Harpsichord Concerto in F Minor' before Hernández is decapitated and his bleeding head is held up for everyone to see. The stranger who disturbed Evoli's reverie proceeds to sing `Happy Birthday' to his host before the debauchery resumes.

The following morning, a bearded reveller wakes and disentangles himself from the naked bodies around him. He picks his way along the corridors and finds a door into the eye-burningly bright daylight. Taking a moment to re-orientate himself, the man heads along a busy road into the heart of the town, where people go about their quotidian business, oblivious to the carnage taking place in their midst.

There is much to commend about this astonishingly bold debut, with the technical contributions of cinematographer Yollotl Alvarado, production designer Manuela Garcia and sound editor Javier Umpierrez being particularly notable. Composer Esteban Aldrete's pounding score and the eclectic song selection also stand out, as Emiliano Rocha Minter concocts a new brand of body horror that matches the most confrontational efforts of Andrzej Zulawski and Gaspar Noé. No wonder Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu have been so quick to applaud their countryman.

But it's trickier to pin down precisely what Minter is trying to say with this sensory assault on so many cinematic taboos. In one interview, he claimed to be `interested in the concept of the cave, the return to animality, a cave that's not only the uterus but someone's skull'. But, while he makes the characters occupy such a setting, the meaning of their descent into a primal state remains elusive and it often seems as though Minter is using his specious scenario as an excuse to outrage the audience while conducting some intrepid formal experiments.

The abrupt cut to heat-detection imagery as Evoli and Gamaliel consummate their lust is eye-catchingly innovative. But the aesthetic audacity and the courage of the performances are insufficient in themselves. Feeling like an exile from an Alejandro Jodorowsky picture, Hernández makes a magnificently malignant sprite, as he combines the messianic and the diabolical in tempting the interlopers into disregarding their moral boundaries. Yet many of the explicit incidents that occur within the psychedelic cavern seem self-consciously provocative. Thus, this is less a `despairing, passionate call to murder', like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien andalou (1928), and more a designerly transgressive dig at the complacent and easily offended.

Third-time Irish director Billy O'Brien also loses control of his material in the home straight in I Am Not a Serial Killer, an adaptation of the first part of Dan Wells's bestselling `John Wayne Cleaver' trilogy of young adult novels. By allowing the initial aura of gallows whimsicality to be supplanted by gory supernaturalism, O'Brien not only foists an abrupt change of tone upon an otherwise agreeably offbeat storyline, but he also sacrifices the hard-earned sense of unpredictability for some disappointingly mundane generic jolts and some freakishly fantastical plot developments.

When a mechanic is brutally murdered in the sleepy mid-Western town of Clayton, the body is brought to the funeral parlour where 18 year-old John Wayne Cleaver (Max Records) lives with his mother, April (Laura Fraser). Familiar with the procedures for embalming corpses, John has no fear of death and touches the insides of the cadaver when April and her sister assistant Margaret (Christina Baldwin) realise that the victim has had a kidney removed by his killer. Snooping around the spot where the body was found, John finds a small pool of tar on the floor.

Bullied at school by Rob Anders (Vincent Risso), John has taught himself to control his temper by paying his tormentors compliments, even when they flick mashed potato into his face. He confides this tactic to birdwatching psychiatrist Dr Grant Neblin (Karl Geary), who informs John that he has sociopathic tendencies, but also has the intelligence to keep them under control. Nevertheless, April is concerned when Principal Layton (James Gaulke) calls her to his office to show her an essay that is full of ghoulish references to death.

Although he has school friends like Max (Raymond Brandstrom), John gets on better with ageing neighbour Bill Crowley (Christopher Lloyd) and shows him how to send a kiss photo to his wife, Kay (Dee Noah). But he also has a crush on classmate Brooke Watson (Lucy Lawton), who lives nearby with her parents (Dave Stauffer and Jennifer Blagen) and younger brother, and he watches her through the window at mealtimes and when she is undressing in her bedroom. So, when Rob warns him off chatting to her at a Halloween party, John spooks him out by telling him how he is sure he is more interesting on the inside (should he ever cut him open) that he appears from his dull exterior.

John gets lectured by Nebin for giving Rob nightmares. But, as a second victim has been found with a severed arm, John is more interested in keeping tabs on a stranger (Matt Roy) he keeps seeing mooching around town. As snow blankets the town, he follows the man when he hooks up with Crowley outside a diner to go ice fishing on the lake. Hiding behind a tree, John watches as his quarry cuts a hole with a chainsaw. But, when he turns his back, Crowley runs him through with a sharp pole and John wets himself with fear.

Waking next morning on the slab in the embalming room, John is told by Margaret to play the dutiful son for Thanksgiving because his sister, Lauren Bacall (Anna Sundberg), has cried off at the last minute. Still musing on what he had witnessed, John stares with grim fascination as April removes the turkey's innards. Determined to do a little snooping, he offers to shovel snow off the Crowleys' drive and is appalled by how nonchalant the couple are as they make him hot chocolate for his efforts.

When they go to an afternoon dance, John follows and learns from the TV news that the most recently deceased went missing over 40 years ago. He notices how Crowley gazes at Olson the barber (Tim Russell) dancing with Kay and follows them to a Chinese restaurant, where his sleuthing is abruptly stopped when he is spotted by April, who is out on a date with Neblin. They argue in the car on the way home, but Neblin insists John is making good progress and April is vaguely reassured.

In fact, John has started researching witchcraft and supernatural phenomena in the school library and is too engrossed to realise that Brooke is trying to reach out to him. But he quickly becomes aware that he is slipping out of his depth when he follows Crowley to the barbershop and tries to stop him from murdering Olson by setting off the burglar alarm. However, he succeeds only in getting two cops killed and wanders past their corpses on the shop floor after watching Crowley drive away with Olson's body in his boot. Shuffling home, he peers in through the window to see the Crowleys dancing together in a pool of golden light.

Hoping to unnerve Crowley, John puts a note saying `I know what you are' on his windscreen watches from his bedroom window as the old man looks around and creeps back indoors. He remains there for over a week and his wife admits to being worried about him when the neighbours gather for an outdoor vigil to show solidarity against the serial killer. She suggests John pays him a visit and he finds him staring into the fire quoting William Blake. A few days later, he has to help him up the stairs to the bathroom and Crowley thanks John for being so supportive.

Christmas comes and Lauren puts in a reluctant appearance. Their father sends them presents, but John is upset by his reminder of the songs they used to sing when he was a kid and he storms out into the snow. He calls Crowley from a callbox to ask why he is so inconsistent in his slaying style. But Crowley jumps into his car tracks him down to the payphone and John only just escapes through the backstreets to seek sanctuary with Max. He is surprised to see his friend on Christmas night and asks him to leave when John admits that he only hangs out with him because he needs someone normal in his life. As he pulls on the panda balaclava his mother bought him, John sees Crowley eviscerating Max's dad (Michael Paul Levin) on the street outside. Feeling brave because his face is covered, he tries to intervene. But Crowley roars at him and he backs away.

On seeing Crowley consoling Max at another candlelit vigil, John feels revulsion (but resists reporting Crowley to the police) and pulls a kitchen knife on April when she pleads with him to talk to her because he has been acting so strangely. Next morning, she tries to reassure him that everything is okay, but John sneaks out to purchase a tracking device (which he buys by trading in the mp3 player his father bought) and slips it into the boot of the Crowleys' car. When Bill goes out in the small hours, John breaks into the house and sends him a photo of Kay sleeping in a bid to prevent him from killing. But she struggles when he tries to put a pillow case over her head and he knocks her out with the clock radio.

Pulling the panda mask over his face, John slips out as Crowley crashes up the stairs to check on his wife. He goes to the car to remove the tracking device and is horrified to see Neblin dead on the backseat. However, he refuses to let Crowley steal a body part and drags his body into the woods. Crowley sees him return to the house and follows to the funeral parlour where the service is being held for Max's dad. He slides into a pew next to John and demands to know where he has hidden Neblin because he needs his heart urgently. But John refuses to divulge the hiding place and tries to lock Crowley in the chapel. However, April is still inside and John rushes to the morgue to discover her lying unconscious on the slab.

He sees she is still breathing and begs Crowley not to hurt her. But he is angry because John harmed Kay and explains that he has remained human for so long because he loved her. Fighting for breath, he asks John for the corpse he needs to harvest and rises to check the body freezer. However, John knock him out with the winch above the slab and urges April to help him drain the corpse of its pitch tar blood and fill it with embalming fluid while Crowley is still unconscious. She wonders what on earth he is doing and stands in amazement as Crowley's body begins to decay and a stick thin demon emerges from inside. It implores John to take care of Kay before stabbing itself with an air line and slumping to the floor.

As John watches Neblin's body being recovered from the woods, a news bulletin announces that Crowley has gone missing. He takes Kay some flowers and sits at her bedside as she describes how she first met her husband when they were both in their thirties. She was deeply touched when he first told her that he loved her on seeing her happy with family. John seems to sense the depth of the twisted love that drove Crowley to kill to stay at Kay's side. But there is no room for sentiment, as he helps April and Margaret embalm Dr Neblin.

There are always risks involved in translating a popular book to the screen, but Billy O'Brien and co-writer Chris Hyde seem to have made a fundamental error in deciding against having John Wayne Cleaver narrate the story, as this deprives the audience of the inner monologue that conveys the struggle against his own inner demons that rages while he works out what to do with Bill Crowley's reign of terror. Max Records makes a suitably affable anti-hero, but he rarely seems cripplingly conflicted and the only tangible evidence of his sociopathic urges comes during his guarded conversations with Dr Neblin. Moreover, by keeping us out of John's head, O'Brien is unable to follow the line of thinking that drives the youth to the occult section of the school library. Consequently, the revelation of Crowley's true identity comes out of nowhere and feels as contrived as the rather feeble digital effects used to depict the fiend.

Despite Robbie Ryan's effective 16mm images of the main street, the steam-spewing utility plant and the frozen Minnesota countryside, O'Brien rather struggles to convey the small-town atmosphere crucial to suggesting a community under siege. In addition, characters like April and Brooke are reduced to walk-ons as the focus fixes firmly on the cat-and-mouse game between John and Crowley, which - despite Adrian Johnston's unsettling score - lags significantly as John witnesses the murder of incidental figures and (having concluded that the local police are incapable of ending the spree) strains to devise a way of preventing Crowley from striking fresh victims.

Yet, amidst the conscious echoes of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko (2001), the edgily vulnerable Records and the poignantly menacing Christopher Lloyd spar teasingly around the themes of empathy and love. So, while adherents of the text might feel short-changed, this seems destined to acquire a certain cult status and do much to boost O'Brien's reputation after the BAFTA-nominated short, The Tale of the Rat That Wrote (1999), and the features, Isolation (2005) and The Hybrid (2014).

While few would champion Steven C. Miller, it's hard not to admire the tenacity that enables him to keep churning out thick-ear action movies featuring onetime A-listers in need of a payday. Following hard on the heels of the execrable Bruce Willis vehicle, Marauders, comes Southern Fury (aka Arsenal), a sibling saga scripted by first-timer Jason Mosberg that affords John Cusack the opportunity to wear a baseball cap backwards to convince everyone he is a rapper and not an undercover cop and Nicolas Cage the chance to gnaw on the scenery while sporting the silliest prosthetic nose, moustache, wig and sunglasses combination in living memory. There was certainly no need to see this tosh on the big screen. But it's awful enough to acquire the kind of cult cachet that makes disc or download viewing all-but essential.

As kids in Biloxi, Mississippi, Zachary Legendre was often mean to younger brother Kelton DuMont and rarely gave him money to spend at the local amusement arcade. But he protected him after their uncle shot himself and gave him his lawnmowing route after local thug Nicolas Cage gave him work at the arcade for keeping quiet about a savage baseball bat assault on a creditor. Thus, when DuMont grows up to be the successful Adrian Grenier, he feels responsible for Johnathon Schaech after he is booted out of the Marines and does some jail time. Wife Lydia Hull would prefer Grenier to focus on her and their new baby, especially as Schaech has messed up his relationships with Megan Leonard and their teenage daughter, Abbie Gayle. But blood is thicker than hooch and Grenier agrees to find Schaech to lend him some cash.

Unfortunately, Schaech uses the funds to buy some cocaine that is stolen from his fridge by a couple of local hoodlums. However, he recognises Shea Buckner's car and dispenses some swift retribution (involving a toilet bowl) and squares the situation with the disapproving Grenier during a Fourth of July barbecue. Drifting off to a bar, however, Schaecs runs into Cage and he suggests that they fake Schaech's kidnapping and split the ransom when Grenier pays up.

On receiving the demand to come up with $350,000 cash in four days, Grenier asks business manager Christopher Rob Bowen to sell what he can. But he also asks Cusack to make some inquiries and refuses to believe the rumour passed on by informant Tyler Jon Olson that Schaech and Cage have conspired to defraud him. Convinced that Buckner is out for revenge, Grenier busts into his home and, following a foot race and a car chase, he discovers at gunpoint that Schaech is being held at Cage's club.

Meanwhile, Cage gets a visit from gun-toting brother Christopher Coppola (his real-life sibling buried beneath a baseball cap, shades and a bogbrush goatee), who is less than amused that he is dragging the family name through the mud by resorting to kidnapping and extortion. However, Coppola underestimates Cage, who beats him senseless in manic slow motion to the accompaniment of a gospel choir singing `Oh, Freedom'. This grotesque sequence triggers a flashback to show how Cage sent henchman Sean Paul Braud to abduct Schaech after he refused to co-operate and this, in turn, tees up a scene of Braud giving Schaech a slo-mo, gore-spurting knuckle-dusting after he delivers a sob story about hating violence after witnessing his father putting his mother in hospital.

As Schaech tries to cut the rope binding his hands, Cage stumbles in to ask if he will listen to a letter he has written to Coppola. With his powder blue suit soaked in blood, Cage outlines how he went to jail for his brother when he was just 17 and emerged three years later to discover that he had kept his share of the loot and set himself up in New Orleans. But he explains that he can't send the note because he has just killed Coppola and he fumes that he has always hated Schaech and Grenier because they have remained close through thick and thin.

Cage forces Schaech to phone Grenier to remind him that the kidnappers mean business. But a casual remark about video games strikes Grenier as odd and he ponders its meaning while showing Hull what a man he can be when his dander is up. He is still mulling it over when Cage sends Braud (who has just pulped Schaech for trying to escape) to invite him to a very public meeting in a restaurant. Now in a salmon pink jacket, Cage puts drops in his eyes, gives Grenier a tip about mixing a Bloody Mary and warns him that Gayle might be in danger unless he comes up with the ransom.

But it's Leonard who is in trouble, as she has taken an overdose after receiving an envelope full of Polaroids showing Gayle in compromising positions. Urging Hull to take care of her, Grenier takes the money and finds Schaech bound at the back of the billiard hall. He frees his brother and goes to the club to pay Cage. However, he has put a stun grenade in the holdall and this stuns Cage sufficiently for Schaech to burst in blazing as banknotes float on the air. As slo-mo shots show one bullet pass through the cheeks of one henchman and another to splatter the back of Braud's skull. Schaech is wounded, but the brothers ping Cage before Grenier lets him have both barrels in the face.

Meeting on the bleachers where they used to hang out as kids, Schaech tells Grenier he is proud of him and they run on to the field for some batting practice to celebrate being able to get on with their lives at long last. Of course they do, how else could this wholesome, sentiment-drenched slice of all-American slaughter and depravity end? Presumably, if they were Mockney mobsters, they would have popped down to the local cricket club for a net.

Words can scarcely convey how utterly redundant this picture is. But where else could you see an Oscar winner having so much demented fun giving his craft the middle finger? The hilariously self-pitying/loathing Cage apart, this is a shambles that is played with all the finesse of Ryan Franks and Scott Nickoley's booming score. The majority of the action sequences have been rendered incomprehensible by the combination of Brandon Cox's jerkicam imagery and Vincent Tabaillon's slice`n'dice editing style. But their efforts are vastly superior to those of Mosberg and Miller, who seem oblivious to the fact that their narrative lurches around like a decapitated chicken in search of an original idea before collapsing in a confused heap. Unfortunately, given Miller's rate of production, we won't have to wait long for the next one.

Finally, failing to deliver on its initial promise, Eric Barbier's The Last Diamond is a homage to the heist thriller that keeps ticking off the items on the classic checklist without putting a fresh spin on them. Thus, instead of subverting tropes like putting the gang together, selecting the dupe and executing the raid, Barbier and co-writers Tran-Minh Nam and Marie Eynard merely reel them off before revisiting that old adage about the scarcity of honour among thieves. En route, he pays his dues to Hollywood capers like John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), as well as to French variations like Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955) and Jean-Pierre Melville's The Red Circle (1970). But, while the pieces slot smoothly into place. this always feels like a decent copy rather than the genuine article.

No sooner is ace safecracker Yvan Attal paroled from prison than loyal lieutenant Jean-François Stevenin has lined up what they agree will be their last job. Belgian crook Antoine Basler is putting together a crew to steal the 137-carat Florentine diamond when it goes on auction in Antwerp and he wants Attal to use his charm to seduce jewellery expert Bérénice Bejo, who has taken over the auction following the mysterious overdose death of her mother.

Exploiting her grief, Attal poses as her mother's trusted security consultant and quickly acquires the information he needs to put the finishing touches to the master plan. However, he finds himself falling in love with Bejo and his feelings are reciprocated during an attempt to steal a key from her hotel room. Being the professional he is, however, Attal reports for the robbery, which goes off without a hitch, despite elderly Annie Cordy paying the price to be in the wrong place.

Flitting on to a waiting boat, the gang makes its getaway. But Basler has no intention of sharing the proceeds and guns down his confederates in cold blood. Although Attal is wounded, he and Stevenin manage to escape and they discover that Basler is in cahoots with Gene Bervoets, a trusted friend of Bejo's mother, who was responsible for killing her in her car.

Risking the fact she might report them to the police, the friends contact Bejo and persuade her to meet them in Luxembourg, where Basler is preparing to sell the Florentine to a Russian billionaire. Bejo's father, Jacques Spiesser, urges her not to trust Attal. But he also winds up on the wrong side of fate when a gun battle breaks out after Basler is rumbled trying to sell a replica diamond. He is arrested along with Bervoets and Attal. But Bejo testifies on behalf of the latter and promises to wait for him when he is released from his two-year sentence.

Reuniting with Barbier after The Serpent (2006), Attal delivers a typically assured performance as the cracksman with an old-fashioned attitude to merchandise and mesdemoiselles. Yet, while he and Bejo banter brightly like George Clooney and Julia Roberts in Steven Soderberg's Ocean's trilogy, they fail to convince as a love match. This would be more of a drawback if Basler didn't make such a hissable villain. But the need to keep switching between crime, romance and comedy prevents Barbier from generating the requisite suspense once the heist itself has been meticulously staged. Making effective use of locations in France, Belgium and Luxembourg, Barbier keeps the action ticking over like brother Renaud's jazzy score by turning Denis Rouden's skittish camera into a silent accomplice. Yet, while it's easy to see why an American producer has picked up the remake rights, this slick collection of charlatans and double-crosses lacks the thematic depth to make it anything more than undemandingly enjoyable.