Middle age can cause men to do ridiculous things in an effort to reclaim their identity. Some invest in gaudy gold watches or flashy red coupés. Others, like Georges, flush their shitty old jackets down gas-station toilets and drive deep into the countryside in search of another.

So begins the eighth feature from French cinema’s enfant absurdist Quentin Dupieux. Thrumming with the twisted logic that has become his trademark, it sees Jean Dujardin’s recently divorced 44-year-old wanting in purpose and…

As far as films about grief go, this darkly fantastical time-loop story is surely one of cinema’s most unusual. Following a bereavement, on-the-skids couple Tobias and Elin go on a camping trip only to be captured and killed by a roving band of pitiless loons who look like a sinister circus troupe from a fairytale long gone sour. Tobias wakes up the next morning and swears it was a dream but when the senseless violence occurs again (and again), he…

Stephen O’Malley has forged a career from doom and fire and steel. As a founding member of drone-metal deities Sunn O))), he has broken boundaries and set standards through such extraordinary records as 2009’s Monoliths and Dimensions and collaborations with experimental acts as diverse as Japanese racket agents Boris, Norwegian noise stewards Ulver and American-British pop-rock maverick Scott Walker. Alongside Sunn O))) co-creator Greg Anderson, O’Malley mines metal music’s most primal element – the unmistakable sound of the distorted guitar…

The name of this lesser-seen Hammer oddity is somewhat incongruous. The horror? Not quite. Given that this 1970 picture portrays its titular character not as a stately scientist consumed by ambition but as a supercilious gobshite and little else, perhaps The Precociousness, The Insolence or The Audacity of Frankenstein may have been more appropriate.

Unlike Hammer’s first adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 story, 1957’s deliberate and wholly dignified The Curse of Frankenstein, this unexpectedly funny flick doesn’t paint the eponymous…