The endearingly cheesy practical effects of the original are gone. But Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, revisiting their rock-loving slackers in full middle-aged himbodom, are historical artefects in themselves.

Despite its initially lush, quirky spin on the 1920s farming life, the course of Claude Berri’s melodrama — in which the theft of water comes to encompass the theft of joy, hope, and other brighter aspects of human nature — has disheartening relevance to Europe a century on.

The discomfiting ugliness and aggression of Andy Kaufman’s comic characters manifests itself in a perplexingly unexplored kink: his habit of wrestling women, including Lynne Marguiles (Courtney Love).

Any viewer who looks at Barbie as a vehicle for meaningful female commentary has already drunk too much of the pinkberry Kool-Aid; even the silliest and less overtly self-referential gags flatter Mattel.

‘Her ability to appear equally likely to swoon or haul off and punch someone works well in a movie that gradually reveals itself as a different sort of procedural than it initially appears.’

Rather than staging a new cold war, the film shifts its focus towards a more modern apocalypse, lending a shocking jolt of relevance to a series that should be gasping for ideas nearly 30 years into its run.

“McCarthy's ferocious tale gives the Coens room to unleash their cinematic gifts, but keeps them from wandering too far afield and losing themselves in the marshes of technical prowess or easy irony. Like the novel, the film ends on one of these latter moments, with the recounting of a dream. It is a dream about death, but a death more welcoming than feared.”

Happy 50th birthday to The Wicker Man, the film that has it all: yodelling hipsters, flower crowns, a tweedy eco-fascist who’s still charismatic and chiselled enough to command the viewer’s attention. While the likes of Elon Musk resort to offers of a cage fight to rally their (digital) serfs, back in the day blokes like Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle could simply threaten them with crop failure. We were a country, once!