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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A dog in the dock and another doing red carpet interviews: why has Cannes gone canine crazy?

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Once a celebration of arthouse raunch, the film festival has had to change in the #MeToo era. Is that why, on screen and off, pooches are everywhere this year? Our writer goes walkies on the Côte d’Azur

One of the most eagerly anticipated talents about to grace the red carpet at Cannes this week is tall, blond, leggy and has a seductively husky voice. Par for the course, you might think, at the glitzy, notoriously libidinous film festival on the sun-kissed Côte d’Azur – were it not for that lolling tongue and the fact that the bag in the hands of the entourage is more likely to be a doggy-doo than a Birkin or Chanel.

Fawn-maned griffon cross Kodi is the star of French-Swiss actor Laetitia Dosch’s directorial debut Dog on Trial, a film that feels precision-engineered for Cannes’ 77th edition in more ways than one. Dosch tells me the following origin story about her first feature. Three years ago, while the script was taking shape inside her head, she bumped into the director Justine Triet on the train from Cannes to Paris.

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