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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‘Audiences don’t want to be challenged’: director Cristian Mungiu on exploring bigotry – and giving up film

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His Palme d’Or-winner explored abortion in his native Romania, and in RMN the director is tackling anti-immigrant sentiment head on. He explains why Europe should pay attention and whether cinema is dead

“Let us mind our words, the west is watching,” says the local mayor, hoping to calm a worked-up crowd of Transylvanian villagers. But the villagers don’t mind their words. Gathered in a packed cultural centre to vent their anger about three Sri Lankans hired by the local bakery, they are angry at everything: the closure of the nearby mine; the villagers who have left for better-paid jobs in Germany and the workload in those jobs that remain; the west’s supposed assault on the nuclear family; the hypocritical European Union. “We got rid of the gypsies,” one irate man in the crowd bellows, “and now we fight over foreigners?”

It’s just one scene from RMN, the new film by Cristian Mungiu, a Palme d’Or-winning director whose work has opened up his homeland Romania to the scrutinising gaze of western European cinema audiences. When Mungiu toured the film around European festivals last year, some people in the Q&A sessions afterwards assumed that the opinions of the villagers were also his.

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