Novocaine review – Jack Quaid is put through the grinder in ultraviolent action comedy

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A man’s inability to feel pain comes in handy in this extravagantly gory bank heist caper Risk-averse San Diego assistant bank manager Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid) lives a cautious, cotton wool-wrapped life. It’s not that he’s afraid of getting hurt. Quite the opposite, since a rare genetic abnormality means he’s unable to feel pain. Rather, Nathan is concerned that because of his sensory quirk he risks inadvertently injuring himself. When the girl of his dreams, sparky fellow bank employee Sherry (Amber Midthunder), is abducted during a heist, and Nathan embarks on an off-the-cuff rescue mission, his unusual condition suddenly comes in handy. While Nathan may feel no pain, the audience certainly does: this is an amped-up, cartoonish blitzkrieg of ultraviolence and – fair warning – a bit of an endurance test if deep-fried fingers and snapped bones give you the ick. Directors Robert Olsen and Dan Berk take a sadistic glee in dreaming up extravagant horrors to inflict on their irrepressib...
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Sick of Myself review – like-chasing narcissist is focus of online fame horror-satire

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A strong lead performance can’t save this unsubtle Norwegian film about a woman who goes too far in chasing social media clout

Kristoffer Borgli’s body-horror satire has had some enthusiastic reviews since it premiered at Cannes last year; I found the Norwegian film unsubtle and unrewarding, exhaustingly implausible on a basic realist level, and containing a jarring obviousness which makes its supposed commentary on society and celebrity all but valueless.

It does, however, have a strong lead performance from Kristine Kujath Thorp, who plays Signe, a young woman in Oslo who is in an uneasy relationship with Thomas (Eirik Sæther), an insufferably conceited conceptual artist creating sculptures from stolen office furniture. In her peevish and snippy way, Signe is toxically jealous of Thomas’s status and prestige; she resents her own subordinate position in their friend group as his girlfriend and her humiliatingly lowly job as a coffee shop barista. There is a weird echo here of Joachim Trier’s incomparably superior The Worst Person in the World, and Sick of Myself features a droll cameo from Trier’s key player, Anders Danielsen Lie.

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