Having proved himself to be the master mamipulator with the seething trilogy comprising Sympathy For Mr Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005), Park Chan-wook stages a puppet show in a doll's house in The Handmaiden, a three-act saga that relocates the action of Sarah Waters's Victorian bodice-ripper, Fingersmith, to 1930s Korea. Joining Choi Dong-hoon's Assassination (2015), Cho Jung-rae's Spirits' Homecoming and Kim Jee-woon's The Age of Shadows (both 2016) in being set during the Japanese domination of the peninsula between 1910-45, this is a masterpiece of studio design, with Ryu Seong-hee's interiors drawing on the Gothic grandeur of Manderlay in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) and Xanadu in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) to lure the audience into making assumptions that rapidly require revision, as alliances crumble and deceptions are exposed.

As the rain hammers down on a slum neighbourhood in an unnamed Korean town, a gaggle of children taunt the Japanese soldiers on patrol as Nam Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) bids farewell to Bok-soon (Lee Yong-nyeo), the matriarch of a family of petty crooks who has doted on Sook-hee since she was orphaned as a young girl and who presents her with an ornate butterfly hairpin as a parting gift. The weather improves as Sook-hee travels to the estate of Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong), who has added English and Japanese wings to the imposing manor in which he lives with his niece, Hideko (Kim Min-hee).

Hurrying along the maze of corridors, housekeeper Madame Sasaki (Kim Hae-sook) outlines Sook-hee's duties as Lady Hideko's handmaiden and informs her that she will now be known by the Japanese name, Tamako. She also explains that Hideko sleeps badly because of her nerves and Sook-hee is woken by screams in the night, as her mistress has a nightmare about the aunt (Moon So-ri) who hanged herself from a branch of the cherry tree that stands outside her bedroom window.

Lying beside Hideko, Sook-hee sings a lullaby, while delighting in hiding the fact she is an expert pickpocket with an eye for forgeries, who has been raised by the baby-farming Bok-soon in competition with the avaricious Kutan (Yoo Min-chae). They are in cahoots with Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), a Korean con-man who poses as a Japanese noble in order to fleece the rich. He has discovered that Kouzuki is a Korean who acquired status as a translator for the occupying forces and married a rich Japanese wife. Yet, despite this façade of respectability, Kouzuki exploits his reputation as a bibliophile to dupe collectors into buying copies of rare manuscripts. Moreover, he plans to marry Hideko to maintain his grip on the family fortune. But Fujiwara plans to propose to Hideko himself and succeeds in securing Sook-hee the position of personal maid in place of Junko (Han Ha-na).

On her first morning, Sook-hee is overwhelmed by Hideko's beauty and her generosity when she gives her a pair of shoes from her own closet. Hideko also agrees to teach Sook-hee to read and leaves her to familiarise herself with her new surroundings while she prepares for a reading she is due to give to Kouzuki and his friends. Snooping in drawers, Sook-hee marvels at the finery of Hideko's possessions and is puzzled by a white rope coiled inside a hat box. But, as she wanders through the extensive grounds, she also wonders why she is so sad when she lives in such luxury. However, she gets an inkling when she enters Kouzuki's forbidding library and sees Hideko kneeling before her black-gloved uncle. She is also taken aback when a metal grille suddenly descends to stop her from going beyond a metal snake embedded in the floor that denotes the boundary of knowledge.

Sook-hee has come to fetch Hideko to prepare her for a visit from Fujiwara and gives her a lollipop to suck in the bath. Unfortunately, it aggravates a troublesome tooth and Sook-hee files down the sharp edge with a thimble while trying not to let her eyes stray to her mistress's naked breasts. She manages to hide her arousal and proves equally circumspect when Fujiwara arrives. He summons her to his room and urges her to convince Hideko of the honourable nature of his intentions, even though he plans to have her committed to an asylum once he has embezzled her fortune. Flopping on the bed, Sook-hee implies that Hideko is too naive to understand seduction, but she promises to do what she can to make her think well of him.

Returning to present Hideko with a pair of blue spinel earrings, Sook-hee almost allows her knowledge of jewellery to give herself away. But she composes herself and escorts Hideko to dinner with a growing realisation she is becoming attracted to her mistress. This feeling intensifies when the tipsy Hideko insists on dressing Sook-hee in a corset and evening gown so she can experience being a lady, Shuddering at the touch of a gloved hand on her neck, Sook-hee muses to herself that being a maid is like playing with a doll. But she is aware she could easily become Hideko's plaything, as she allows her to undo the laces of her undergarments and undress her.

The next day, Sook-hee notices Hideko's apprehension as she waits for Fujiwara to give her a painting lesson. She also feels a pang on watching him flirt with Hideko and whisper that she is as ready for plucking as the peach in her still-life arrangement. Torn between doing her job (and securing herself all of Hideko's clothing and jewellery, as well as a cut of the fortune) and her rising emotions, Sook-hee pushes Fujiwara's case when she is alone with Hideko. But she also wants to delay the inevitable, so she can spend longer in her presence. As they walk in the woods, she lets slip that her mother was hanged. Yet, when Hideko blames herself for killing her own mother by being born, Sook-hee takes her face in her hands and reassures her (as Bok-sun had once done to her) that her mother would have died content that she had given life to such an angel.

As Sook-hee goes in search of mushrooms, they are joined by Fujiwara and Sook-hee is angry when he sends her back to the house. She also gets upset during an outdoor painting session when he sends her to fetch some oils and takes advantage of her absence to kiss Hideko. But Hideko chides her after the reading is interrupted by a power cut and she has to remove her make-up and undress by herself because Sook-hee has fallen asleep. She orders her to get into bed, as she feels a nightmare coming on. But she also wants to ask what the Count will want from her in bed and she is pleasantly surprised when Sook-hee kisses her so she can experience the sensation. Hideko protests that no man will want her because of her cold hands and she demonstrates by touching Sook-hee's breast. She suggests Sook-hee reciprocates so she can learn how to respond when Fujiwara touches her, but they give up the pretence of a tutorial when Sook-hee parts Hideko's thighs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the women avoid eye contact during an art class the following morning. But Sook-hee disobeys Fujiwara's order to leave the room and she threatens to expose him if he rushes Hideko into making a decision. He is furious with her, but realises he needs her help to win Hideko's heart. Yet, when Sook-hee asks her mistress if she has feelings for Fujiawara, she hints that her heart belongs to someone else and slaps Sook-hee when she dares to suggest that she will grow to love Fujiawara.

Despite being hurt by the reprimand, Sook-hee continues to play her part when Fujiawara makes a show of leaving when Kouzuki departs to inspect a coal mine. The plan, however, is that Fujiawara will return to elope with Hideko. But she has insisted that Sook-hee remains her maid and the Count has little option but to agree.

Sliding open panel doors in the Japanese wing of the mansion, Hideko and Sook-hee slip past the cherry tree (which has a white rope dangling from a branch) to find Fujiwara waiting in a small boat. The women hold hands as he rows through the morning mist and Hideko clings to Sook-hee as Japanese sailors clamour around the ferry rails to catch sight of their homeland after three years away. Even on the train taking them to the mountain monastery where they will be wed, Hideko prefers the company of her maid, who notices how delicately she uses her chopsticks to eat single grains of rice during meals. Yet, even though Hideko turns round to look at Sook-hee while taking her vows, she finally finds herself alone in the marital bed and Sook-hee huddles in misery as she hears Hideko cry out with what she takes to be pain rather than pleasure.

The following morning, Sook-hee sees a spot of blood on the bed sheet. But Fujiwara has already gone to the city to make arrangements to transfer Hideko's inheritance into his own name. In his absence, Hideko asks Sook-hee if they can continue to play the maid game. But Sook-hee is desperate for her part in the scheme to be over and she is relieved when Fujiwara returns with a Gladstone bag full of banknotes. Yet, when they take Hideko to the asylum after Sook-hee tells a pair of doctors that her mistress needs to be protected from herself, Hideko assumes the identity of the maid and shoots Sook-hee a cold stare as she is restrained by the orderlies.

As Part Two opens, Madame Sasaki holds the young Hideko (Jo Eun-hyung) so that her uncle can punish her. He orders her to sleep alone from now on and Sasaki is busy telling her about the ogre that will smother her unless she behaves when he aunt emerges from the supposedly cursed door and lights a lamp so that Hideko will not be afraid. She teaches her how to read and suffers the same punishment of Kouzuki rubbing his gloves in their faces when they giggle while learning the names of body parts from an illustrated text. He later upbraids Hideko for reading an erotic story too quickly and she is made to watch as her aunt recites for a select gathering of gentlemen in tuxedos.

Yet her aunt hangs herself from the cherry tree and Hideko becomes convinced that her spirit passed into its bark. As a young woman, she used to hang from the branch by her hands and feel the power flowing into her. She channelled this into her readings for her uncle's clients. But, one night, she is taken by the handsome features of Fujiwara as she reads a Sadean story of flagellation and asphyxiation. Kouzuki similarly senses Fujiwara's interest in Hideko and he concludes the session by having her strike an erotic pose with a wooden mannequin while suspended in mid-air.

Snooping around the study after the others have left, Hideko sees Kouzuki commissioning Fujiwara to forge the missing illustrations from a rare tome and she is taken by the stranger who asks so bluntly why Kouzuki is so obsessed with the Japanese and why he divorced his wife (Sasaki) in order to marry Hideko's mother (Rina Tagaki). She is also impressed by the way he urges the older man not to force himself upon his niece if he wishes to win her affection.

Thus, when he suggests a nocturnal assignation in the garden, Hideko lures Fujiwara to her room and demands to know everything about him. He admits to being the son of a farmhand and he claims to have spent three years perfecting the crafts of bookmaking and painting in order to get close to her. She tells him that Kouzuki (whose tongue has been blackened by ink) murdered her aunt for trying to run away and has threatened to take her into the basement if she ever betrays him. Fujiwara offers her a vial of deadly opium as a wedding gift and she agrees that they should marry and split her fortune. She also suggests that he finds a gullible maid that they can lock away in a madhouse under her name and orders him to seduce Junko so that they have an excuse to fire her.

Although Fujiwara has informed Hideko that Sook-hee is a little simple and impetuous, she feels an immediate bond with her and slaps the maid who stole Sook-hee's shoe to humiliate her. She also invites her to share the tub after she has filed her tooth and follows Fujiwara's instructions to win Sook-hee over with baubles by giving her the spinel earrings and telling her how pretty she looks as a fine lady. Yet, when Sook-hee consoles her over her mother's death, Hideko starts to feel she could be a genuine companion and she rebuffs Fujiwara's clumsy attempts at canoodling to fool Sook-hee into thinking they are in love. Moreover, she realises during the power cut reading that she is becoming besotted and, after their first love-making session, they spend their nights exploring ways to pleasure each other without anyone discovering their secret.

At the height of passion, Hideko promises never to betray Sook-hee. But the latter is so in thrall to Fujiwara that she continues to plead his cause and gets slapped across the face for her trouble. Distraught at being trapped in her own fiendish plan, Hideko takes her aunts rope and is about to hang herself from the same branch when Sook-hee catches her. She confesses to being in cahoots with Fujiwara to put her in an asylum and divide her fortune. But Hideko reveals that she had also been plotting with him to incarcerate Sook-hee. They decide, therefore, to be true to their feelings for each other and turn the tables on the scheming con man. Having told Bok-sun about their plan, Sook-hee sets about destroying Kouzuki's library by slashing the books, as well as splattering them with ink and dropping them into an ornamental water feature.

Thus, by the time Part Three commences, Hideko and Sook-hee have turned the tables on the men who seek to exploit them and Hideko has to suppress a smile before she turns away from Sook-hee wriggling in the arms of the burly asylum orderlies. She also retains her sang-froid as Fujiwara announces that it would be better to kill Sook-hee than let her rot in the madhouse, as she knows that Bok-sun and her stuttering sidekick Goo-gai (Lee Dong-hwi) will rescue her from a fire in the kitchen and that she will use the butterfly hair pin to pick the lock of her manacles so she can escape. Meanwhile, Hideko gets the better of Fujiwara by asking him to teach her about sex and then drizzling opium-doctored wine into his mouth as they kiss.

So, while Hideko and Sook-hee are able to reunite in a secluded Kobe side street, Fujiwara is taken to Kouzuki's house, where he is strapped down in the basement beside a tank housing a large octopus (presumably a little in-joke for Oldboy fans). The old man gloats as he uses a paper guillotine to sever his fingers while he rattles off the titles of his favourite works of erotica. Fatefully, however, he allows him a last smoke while he describes how it felt to deflower his niece. As Fujiwara recalls Hideko masturbating on their wedding night and cutting her hand to smear the sheet, she disguises herself as a man to escape with Sook-hee by train to the ferry port. Once at sea, she discards her moustache and her wedding ring and they arrive at their new lodgings as Kouzuki and Fujiwara expire from the fumes of the latter's mercury-laced cigarettes. Free at last, the woman make love using the `minling' bells of passion that Hideko had inherited from her aunt.

Working in South Korea for the first time since Thirst (2009), Park allows echoes of his Hollywood debut, Stoker (2013), to reverberate around this intricately structured and slickly mounted allegory on subjugation and emancipation. Those familiar with the writings of Sarah Waters will recognise her pet themes, but Park and regular co-scenarist Chung Seo-kyung add a layer of specific political history that makes the focus on female rebellion all the more potent. Some may be discomfited by the need to depict so much misogynist objectification and the more gratuitous close-ups used during the bedroom scenes. But the nudity is hardly of a pinku-eiga calibre and feels less voyeuristic than it was at times in Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013) and some of the chauvinist curse is taken off by the playful nature of the tone and the final dawning that Hideko and Sook-hee were in control of their own destiny for much of the time.

As the maid and the heiress, Kim Tae-ri and Kim Min-hee make a splendidly contrasting pair, as do the urbane Ha Jung-woo and the depraved Cho Jin-woong. But, while we keep making fresh discoveries about the quartet and their peccadilloes, the characterisation remains somewhat shallow, as the demands of the perspective-shifting plot leave little room for delving too deeply. But, while the principals are primarily marionettes dressed in Jo Sang-gyeong's exquisite costumes, Park treats the mise-en-scène as a key player and Jung Jung-hoon's camera is forever alighting upon objects like the hair pin, the rope and the minling bells that initially seem insignificant but later turn out to be crucial. Thus, this is consistently compelling and feels over in a trice at 144 minutes. But it takes a second viewing fully to appreciate Park's mischievous finesse.

Alarm bells have to sound when a biopic opens with the disclaimer, `Any resemblance to any living persons is entirely coincidental.' But Robert Mullan's study of Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing's five-year tenure at Kingsley Hall in East London in the 1960s plays so fast and loose with the facts that many viewers will spend much of Mad to Be Normal trying to work out whether they are watching recreation or hokum. While it's one thing to bring the death of Laing's daughter forward by almost a decade to provide some dramatic impetus (a gambit Laing's son Adrian has dismissed as `a cheap trick, played from the bottom of the deck, badly'), it's quite another to invent the majority of the secondary characters, including the American PhD student whose relationship with the controversial celebrity shrink jeopardises his bold experiment to house patients and carers under one roof in a bid to treat a range of mental health issues without medication.

Mullan has been making documentaries since the late 1980s and can hardly be accused of opting for easy feature projects. This is the first feature he has made on a non-Lithuanian theme after We Will Sing (2015) recalled the 1991 Soviet attack on the television station in Vilnius, Gitel (2013) centred on the genocide in Kaunas in October 1941, and Letters to Sofija (2012) charted the relationship between fin de siècle painter-composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis and his journalist wife, Sofija Kymantaite. As the latter explored Ciurlionis's battle with bipolar affective disorder, it would make a fine companion to Mullan's latest outing, which takes its title from his 1995 tome, Mad to Be Normal: Conversations With RD Laing (1995). Indeed, as he is also the author of RD Laing: A Personal View (1999), there can be no doubt that Mullan knows his stuff. He has also assembled a fine cast on a limited budget. But he makes a number of dubious dramatic decisions in realising this portrait of the Glasgow-born `acid Marxist', who once dropped LSD with Sean Connery, socialised with The Beatles and shared a stage with The Grateful Dead.

After blaring blasts of Julie Driscoll's `Season of the Witch' and the Kinks classic `You Really Got Me' establish that the action take place in the 1960s, the picture opens with a crowd gathering to see RD Laing (David Tennant) give a lecture. Somewhere in the audience are Angie Wood (Elisabeth Moss) and Jim Roberts (Gabriel Byrne). But they are nowhere to be seen as Laing invites a guest (Nicola Simonds) to Kingsley Hall to eat and interact with Raymond (Tom Richards), who has a Messiah complex, and Maria (Olivia Poulet), who is suffering from postpartum depression. Laing chides his guest when she claims to be scared by Raymond's attempt to cleanse her of her demons and questions whether her fear is sufficient justification for incarcerating someone like Raymond, who had earlier been seen brandishing a kitchen knife before being pacified by Dr Paul Zemmell (Adrian Paul Harvey).

Angie calls Laing out of the blue and they arrange to have lunch. After a swigged glass of Chianti, however, Laing decamps to his bedroom at Kingsley Hall. Wrapped in a blanket and puffing on a post-coital cigarette, Angie reads to him from one of his own books on his views on `normal' people slaughtering each other in wars before they get into an argument over whether he should stay with his estranged wife for the sake of their children.

After a brief scene of Maria cutting her wrist in front of her visiting mother, Mullan cuts to John Holding (Jerome Holder) receiving electro-shock therapy for catatonic schizophrenia. His mother (Linda Hargreaves) is appalled when Dr Meredith (David Bamber) compares the treatment to giving a broken radio a jolt and brings him to Kingsley Hall, despite her husbands misgivings that Laing experiments on his patients. He promises to listen when he is ready to speak, as he does with Sydney Kotok (Michael Gambon), who is troubled by a childhood trauma, and Jim, who moves back to the hall because he is having a hard time and almost gets into a fight in a bar while howling at the moon (which he claims has an effect on the water in his brain).

Angie has now moved in with Laing and looks on as he brings in Hare Krishna disciples to chant in the recreation room. However, Jim is disturbed by the noise and reads Oscar Wilde's poetry while stroking his caged dove Frank to keep himself calm. His problems become apparent when he chats to Angie, however, as he warns her that if she ever takes Laing away he would be forced to obey the voices in his head ordering him to punish her. Maria also feels the need for drastic action when she uses a welding torch to set light to her room and pleads with Laing to perform an exorcism after he mentions that some tribes believe the placenta contains malevolent spirits. By contrast, John remains in his room and scrawls on the wall while whispering conspiratorially to himself, as Zemmell tries to coax him into opening up about what is troubling him.

Laing persuades Sydney to take LSD and he hallucinates about witnessing his father kill his mother with an axe. For some reason, Jim is there to hold Sydney's hand and he joins Laing. Angie, Zemmell, Raymond, Maria and the ever-silent Sam (James Utechin) in a group acid drop that has them all tripping in smoke-suffused slow-motion. Some time later, Angie finds Laing lying on his bed reflecting upon his father's breakdown and his mother's cold-heartedness. She is clearly hurt when he declines to declare his love for her and prevents her from accompanying him to Glasgow to see his ailing daughter, Susie (Alexandra Finnie). But Laing has little time for other people's feelings and tries to shame mother Amelia (Helen Belbin) when he discovers she is trying to give him a heart attack by sticking pins into a voodoo doll.

Following a sequence in which Zemmell struggles to control Jim as he tries to treat Sydney and Raymond and gets too clingy while dancing with Angie, we zoom across the Atlantic to New York, where Laing signs books, plays down his reputation as `the white Martin Luther King' and tells an audience of eminent doctors that madness should be seen as a breakthrough rather than a breakdown. He also asks Dr Bloom (Nigel Barber) if he can see Sarah (Lydia Orange), a violent patient who is kept in solitary. Stripping down to his shirt and shorts, Laing shows her how to relax by massaging pressure points on her face and feet and annoys Bloom by sending out for pizza before returning Sarah to her own room. When Bloom protests, Laing accuses him of using pills to make life easier for himself and jets back to Britain to find Zemmell having a crisis of confidence that he conquers with a couple of joints and a broken vase.

As Laing's fame continues to grow, Angie starts to feel detached. So, having sung `After You're Gone' to him at a swanky party, she suggests having a child together. He is hardly enthusiastic and, several months later, Angie asks Maria if she has made a terrible mistake by trying to trap him in a family he doesn't really want. But she has a son in the presence of a documentary crew and, despite Jim's concerns about the child being consumed by a dragon, all seems well at Kingsley Hall, especially because John emerges from his cocoon to reveal lucidly over breakfast that the voice in his head had commanded him to count to a million and back and that it had taken him five years because of all the interruptions.

However, with Jim stealing and eating the placenta and threatening to crucify Raymond and kill baby Gabriel, Angie becomes concerned when Laing refuses to ask Jim to leave because he has a duty to protect him. This arrogant belief in his own rectitude leads him to compare Meredith's ECT methods with Nazi experimentation on the mentally ill during a chat show discussion. But his world comes crashing down when Suzie is diagnosed with leukaemia and she insists on knowing the truth when he rushes to her bedside. She asks about an afterlife and tells him off when he tries to avoid answering. But, following a reassuring hug, Laing is soon back on a slow train south, with half of his sombre face covered in shadow.

He starts drinking heavily and Angie tries to understand his pain when he asks who will look after him while he is helping everyone else. But when she confides in Zemmell at a party, Laing brands her a slut and punches her in the face after she slaps him. They argue about his egotism and her delusion that she is suffering in any way compared to the patients in his care. But he soon has much more to worry about, as locals throw stones through the windows in protest at having lunatics on their doorstep and Meredith petitions a medical panel to have Kingsley Hall closed and Laing declared a quack. John is sectioned and so is Jim after he attempts to attack Angie with a blow torch. Zemmell is furious with Laing for using sedatives on Jim and for betraying his trust. Consequently, they give each other the cold shoulder at a going-away party that ends in Angie taking a taxi alone after Laing and Sam go to the mental hospital to pay their regards to Jim and rescue John in the dead of night.

And that is where this peculiar picture ends. A caption confirms that Kingsley Hall closed in 1970 and that, while Laing's ideas live on, his communal experiment has never been repeated. But such blithe statements do nothing to paper over the whopping cracks in a screenplay (by Mullan and Tracey Morton) that makes no attempt to discriminate between the factual and the fallacious. Presumably, Mullan overlooked Laing's Kingsley Hall colleague Joseph Berke because playwright David Edgar had covered his relationship with a schizophrenic artist in Mary Barnes. But surely something might have been said about the Philadelphia Association, which Laing and Berke co-founded with fellow radicals David Cooper, Aaron Esterson, Sidney Briskin and Clancy Sigal.

Instead, Mullan elects to pit Laing against superannuated practitioners like the non-existent Meredith and Bloom. But such risible caricatures make it almost impossible to take the film seriously, especially when it chooses to overlook such crucial factors as the role that two rooftop leaps played in Kinglsey Hall being closed down. Unlike Zemmell and Laing and their broken vase, therefore, Mullan proves unable to glue his fragments together. As a result, he is left with a series of random set-pieces that offer no worthwhile insights into the man and his methods, as the audiences can never rely on the veracity of what it is watching.

Wearing an array of Paisley shirts and velvet suits, David Tennant captures Laing's essential narcissism. But his charisma is borne away on Laurie Yule's twanging guitar interludes. Thus, there's no depth to a characterisation that leaves little room for anyone else to make much impression. Gabriel Byrne is effectively menacing as the possessive Jim, but Michael Gambon is given far too little to do. Indeed, the Kingsley residents feel more like roughly sketched case studies than human beings, while Elisabeth Moss's cardboard cut-out fabrication feels like something concocted as a love interest for a Golden Age biopic of a gay songwriter. In fairness, she copes well with a thankless role that contains echoes of her magnificent performance in Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth (2015). But, despite solid contributions by cinematographer Ali Asad and production designer Celina Norris, this earnest labour of love isn't remotely in the same class.

By sheer(ish) coincidence, this week also sees the reissue of Milos Formans adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), which became the first feature since Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934) to win the Big Five Academy Awards. The feat has since been emulated (and somewhat devalued) by Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991). But time has done little to diminish the power of Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher's performances as Randle McMurphy and Mildred Ratched, the rebellious patient and martinet nurse who lock horns in an Oregon psychiatric hospital in the early 1960s.

Having fled Czechoslovakia following the 1968 Soviet invasion, Forman was the perfect choice to direct this allegory on the systematic suppression of individuality and one wonders how he might have fared with Kirk Douglas reprising the role he had originated on Broadway in 1963. But, despite Kesey's preference for Gene Hackman and discussions involving Marlon Brando and Burt Reynolds (seriously!), it's nigh on impossible to think of anyone else playing the prison farm recidivist who takes the chance while being evaluated to provoke fellow inmates Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif), Chief Bromden (Will Sampson), Dale Harding (William Redfield), Max Taber (Christopher Lloyd), Charlie Cheswick (Sydney Lassick) and Martini (Danny DeVito) into insurrection against Ratched and her detested regime. Then again, who could envisage Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Colleen Dewhurst, Angela Lansbury, Geraldine Page or Lily Tomlin in that starched white uniform?

The fact that Ratched is a neurotic, sexually repressed spinster has come in for much feminist scrutiny over the last 42 years. But, given that America has just declined the opportunity to hand controlling power to a woman, Ratched's determination to keep the free-thinking McMurphy on her ward so that she can break his spirit has a disconcerting new relevance. Perhaps more importantly, the film also shows how a statutory rapist like McMurphy can disrupt the status quo and, by refusing to play by the establishment's rules, smash the system to suit one's own agenda.

Exceptionally scripted by Bo Goldman, photographed by Haskell Wexler, designed by Paul Sylbert and scored by Jack Nitzsche, this fully deserves the epithet `modern classic'. Indeed, since Kesey wrote his novel in 1959 (and, in the process, became a countercultural icon), the struggle between Ratched and McMurphy has reflected the ever-evolving, but rarely changing state of American society between the election of a war hero and a reality TV star. However, the wait goes on for the political equivalent of Chief Bromden to find his voice and throw a metaphorical hydrotherapy cart through the White House window.

Also returning to the big screen this week is David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001), a neo-noirish Hollywood allegory that has launched a thousand interpretations. This compellingly cryptic puzzle is well worth watching repeatedly. Yet, even though Lynch has overseen the recent restoration and 4K digital transfer and notwithstanding the fact that it topped a BBC Culture poll of 177 critics from 36 countries to find the best film (to date) of the 21st century, this reissue seems a bit previous. Consequently, we shall content ourselves with a bit of background and a brief overview and leave you to carry on following the dream-logic to wherever you feel it leads.

Having won a jitterbug contest in Deep River, Ontario, aspiring actress Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) pays a visit her aunt's apartment in a Los Angeles building superintended by Coco Lenoix (Ann Miller). However, she is surprised to find the shower occupied by a brunette amnesia victim who has taken the name Rita (Laura Harring) from a poster for the 1946 Rita Hayworth drama, Gilda. On finding $50,000 in cash and a blue key in the stranger's bag, Betty vows to help her rediscover her identity.

Meanwhile, gangster Vincenzo Castigliane (Dan Hedaya) puts pressure on director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) to cast Camilla Rhodes (Melissa George) in his new movie. When he finds his wife Lorraine (Lori Heuring) cheating on him with the pool cleaner (Billy Ray Cyrus) and his bank account closed, Adam listens when a shadowy figure named The Cowboy (Monty Montgomery) advises him to do as he's told, if he knows what's good for him. The next day, however, Adam sees Betty when a casting agent brings her to the set of The Sylvia North Story. But he is too busy auditioning Camilla as she sings Linda Scott's 'I've Told Ev'ry Little Star' to speak to her before she rushes off to find Rita, who has been prompted to remember the name Diane Selwyn by a chance encounter at Winkie's diner.

Having found Diane's address in the phone book, Betty and Rita pay her a call, only to find a dead body in the bedroom. Detectives McKnight (Robert Forster) and Domgaard (Brent Briscoe) believe she is the latest victim of a serial killer who keeps eluding them. On returning home, Betty allows panic and lust to get the better of her and she sleeps with Rita, who is now wearing a blonde wig. At 2am, Rita suggests they go to Club Silencio, where The Magician (Richard Green) announces that everything is an illusion before Rebekah Del Rio (playing herself) lip-synchs to a Spanish rendition of the Roy Orbison hit, `Crying' before collapsing.

Betty finds a blue box in her bag and they go home to fetch the key. But Betty suddenly disappears and something distinctly odd happens when Rita opens the box. Meanwhile, Diane (Watts) is woken by The Cowboy in the bedroom where Betty and Rita had found the corpse. She turns out to be a struggling actress who is still coming to terms with her break up with Camilla (now played by Harring), who had secured her small speaking parts when they were an item. But Camilla had tired of Diane and had started flirting with Adam on the set of The Sylvia North Story. In order to humiliate her, Camilla invites Diane to a dinner party hosted by Adam and his mother Coco, where he announces his engagement to Camilla. She kisses another woman (Melissa George) to cement her triumph and Diane is crushed.

She returns home to find a blue key on her coffee table. This was the sign she had arranged with a hitman named Joe (Mark Pellegrino) to confirm that he has killed Camilla. Tormented by hallucinations of a black-skinned creature, Diane shoots herself in the head before the police can arrest her. As she dies on the bed where Rita and Betty found the decomposing corpse, a blue-haired woman at the club whispers, `Silencio'.

Lynch had first conceived Mulholland as a Twin Peaks spin-off for Sherilyn Fenn's character, Audrey Horne. However, it had withered on the drawing-board and remained in the files until Tony Krantz had pitched the concept to ABC in 1998. While a pilot episode was filmed, the network bigwigs were so baffled that they declined to take up the series option. But Studio Canal's Pierre Edelman was intrigued enough to buy the rights and give Lynch an extra $7 million to polish the pilot to feature standard. Ultimately, he only required 18 new pages of script to earn himself an Oscar nomination and a share of the Best Director prize at Cannes with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn't There.

Lynch mischievously billed the picture `A love story in the city of dreams.' But it was the enigmatic nature of the sinuously surreal storyline that captured the imagination of audiences and critics, who recognised a companion piece to Lost Highway (1997), in which Bill Pullman's jailbird had mysteriously morphed into Balthazar Getty. Directing with typical audacity and finesse, Lynch is superbly served by a wonderful ensemble led by Laura Harring and Naomi Watts (who modelled Betty on Doris Day, Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren), as well as by production designer Jack Fisk, cinematographer Peter Deming, editor Mary Sweeney and composer Angelo Badalamenti, who also has a cameo as Dan Hedaya's mobster brother. But the most vital component of this thrilling concoction is the viewer, as the secret to the film's success lies in the curiosity and confusion that coerces each person watching into devising their own reading of what has unfolded before their very eyes.

Over the Easter weekend in 2015, a gang of seasoned criminals broke into what was supposed to be one of the most impregnable vaults in London. Two movies have already been made about the caper, with a third in the pipeline being rumoured to have Michael Caine onboard. Few will have had the chance to see Terry Lee Coker's Hatton Garden the Heist (2016), as it failed to secure a theatrical release. But much fuss has been made about Ronnie Thompson's The Hatton Garden Job, as it arrives with a paschal promptness that might pique the curiosity of those fancying a bit more codgering criminality after enjoying Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin's antics in Zach Braffs remake of Martin Brest's Going in Style (1979).

Mercifully closer in tone to Roger Donaldson's The Bank Job and Paris Leonti's Daylight Robbery (both 2008) than John Miller's Golden Years (2016), this is a nick above the typical BritCrime offering. But Thompson - who is helming his second solo feature after following Tower Block (2012), which he co-directed with James Nunn, with I Am Soldier (2014) - doesn't stray far from Mockney territory in piecing together the role played by Basil, the anonymous brains behind the operation who is believed to be an ex-cop currently lying low in Panama with his share of the £14 million loot. If he remains at large, we can almost certainly expect a documentary attempting to unmask the mystery man in the manner of Chris Long's Great Train Robbery exposé, A Tale of Two Thieves (2014). But, for now, we shall have to make do with ploddingly perfunctory reconstructions like this.

During an opening monologue about the changing nature of crime and the rise of an undeserving elite, we see XXX (Matthew Goode) being jailed after accomplice Judas-Jack (Jack Doolan) squeals to cops Frank Baskin (Mark Harris) and his assistant, Emma Carter (Sarah-Jane Crawford), about burgling a City banker. During his three-year stretch, however, XXX learns from Hungarian mobster Zoltan (David Goodman) that boss Erzebet Zslondos (Joely Richardson) needs a daring crook to do a job and he seals the deal over a shot to break into a Hatton Garden Safe Deposit vault.

Needing an expert crew, XXX decides to catch up with veteran Danny Jones (Phil Daniels) and he promises to look up some old school pals. Yet, while 76 year-old Brian Reader (Larry Lamb) is protesting during a wander around a cemetery that he's too old to be taking on such an ambitious job, the recently retired Baskin meets up with kingpin Marcus Ford (Stephen Moyer) in an empty Upton Park to discuss rumours that the Hungarians are planning something big. Ford isn't bothered about foreign rivals hitting the jackpot, but he is keen to get hold of one of the boxes inside the vault and he orders Baskin to ensure he gets it.

Nettled by some cocky kids on the top deck of a bus, Reader changes his mind about the blag and meets with XXX and Jones in a quiet pub to suggest bringing in Kenny Collins (Clive Russell) as the lookout/driver and Terry Perkins (David Calder) as the muscleman. They meet up at their lock-up HQ, where Perkins tells a gratuitous joke about a woman in a wheelchair before Reader outlines the plan and XXX describes the layout of 88-90 Hatton Gardens. Posing as a potential client, Lamb get a guided tour of the camera-free basement, while Perkins stakes out the place to scout security staff rotations and Jones - who has joked that the `OAP's XI' is about to pull off `the biggest blingo blag in history' - is dispatched to find some secondhand power tools to cut through the 18 inches of concrete in the vault door.

Armed with the alarm codes provided by Zslondos, XXX sets the raid for the Easter weekend. The gang almost have a run-in at the pub with cocky teenager Isaac (Sam Adewumni) and his noisy pals, while a meeting outside a casino convinces Ford that Zslondos is behind the Hatton Garden job. So, he sends Baskin to make XXX an offer he can't refuse in return for a little insurance down at the police station. Zslondos is unhappy with this development, but he has more to worry about when Reader falls ill and son Paul (David Garlick) refuses to let him leave the house.

Naturally, Reader gives Paul the slip and catches a bus to Central London in time to join the others as they carry their equipment into the building in wheelie bins. XXX uses the alarm codes to get them into the vault, while Collins takes up position in the street outside to maintain walkie-talkie contact. All seems to be going well, as they winch open the grilles and start drilling through a vault door that has been designed to withstand a nuclear explosion. But XXX notices that they have tripped a silent alarm and he has to call in a favour from Baskin to prevent the cops from responding. Perkins overhears the conversation and there is momentary tension between the thieves.

Reader calms them down and they press on until Collins warns them that one of the security guards is snooping around the front door. Luckily, he is getting phone grief from his wife and heads home rather than doing his job and this enables the gang to drill their three holes. As they set up a hydraulic ram to knock over a cabinet pinned to the wall, however, Reader collapses and, on discovering that the compressor cable has burnt out, they decide to get him help rather than complete the mission. All seems doom and gloom as Collins, Perkins and Jones nurse beers at the Railway Tavern and XXX sleeps on the lock-up soda. But Reader calls to urge them to go back and finish what they started and a montage shows XXX and Jones rifling through boxes to amass their ill-gottens.

On the outside, XXX calls Judas-Jack for a lift and rewards him with a large diamond. But, as he surveys the swag, Baskin holds him up at gunpoint and order him to place it all in a bag. However, Zslondos walks in with her armed goons and Baskin backs down. She raises an eyebrow on sneaking a peak at the contents of Box 175 and praises XXX for his expertise before leaving with the jewels. A shrugging Baskin admits defeat and makes his delivery to Ford. He also gives Carter a tip-off so she can arrest Judas-Jack for possession of stolen goods. But, while XXX drops into a travel agency, his cohorts order champagne in the pub and, by living it so conspicuously large, they give the game away, get busted and go down for six years each.

Two decades have passed since Guy Ritchie scored a monumental box-office hit with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and unintentionally calcified the British crime saga. Notwithstanding the smugly zeitgeisty opening rant about the `lucky elite', this likely laddish romp could have been made by any one of the time-servers who have kept the genre chugging along since 1998. But, while Thompson fails to impose much personality on the project, he does bring an undeniable proficiency to a picture that has been designed, photographed and edited with artisanal adroitness by Jeff Schell, Arthur Mulhern and Emma Gaffney. The score by Lol Hammond and Duncan Forbes and the original songs by Andrew Barnabas and Paul Arnold are less impressive, although there are welcome blasts of Johnny Thunder's `I'm Alive' during the robbery and Beady Eye's `Second Bite of the Apple' over the closing credits.

Changing pace after his stint in Downton Abbey, Matthew Goode just about convinces as an East End villain alongside such dependable old lags as Larry Lamb, Phil Daniels, Clive Russell and David Calder. But Joely Richardson doesn't quite cut it as the fictitious Magyar matriarch who is a front for the real driving force behind the raid. Indeed, Thompson and co-scribes Ray Bogdanovich and Dean Lines are not only guilty of tweaking the truth, but they also turn hardened criminals into genial geezers in the name of sanitised entertainment. Reader, for example, was involved in the 1983 Brink's Mat bullion robbery that claimed the life of a policeman, while John `Goldfinger' Palmer was murdered before he could reveal the identity of `Basil the Ghost', who had seemingly been in cahoots with the bosses of the leading London crime family that had organised the job in order to obtain a deposit box containing evidence that could incriminate them in a murder investigation. No one is suggesting that a film-maker is duty-bound to tell the whole truth and nothing but. However, there is still a sizeable difference between judicious mendacity and what Thompson calls `filmic reality'.