Crowe plays an ex-cop receiving treatment for dementia who revisits one of his old cases, only to unearth some uncomfortable but entertaining memories

Entirely preposterous as it is, there’s a fair bit of entertainment to be had in what might be called an erotic pulp-noir from screenwriter turned director Adam Cooper, adapted from the 2017 crime bestseller The Book of Mirrors by Eugene Chirovici. I can imagine Brian De Palma being interested in it – and he might have wanted to twist the eroticism dial clockwise a click or two more.

Russell Crowe plays Roy Freeman, a depressed ex-cop whose wife left him long ago, battling to stay on the wagon, living in squalor and undergoing an experimental treatment to reverse his early onset dementia; he has labels on everything in his apartment to remind him what they’re for – but still occasionally opens the microwave to find the TV remote, completely fried. One day he is visited by a prison charity worker, begging him to visit a former junkie and burglar now on death row for the murder, 10 years previously, of charismatic psychology professor Joseph Wieder (Márton Csókás) – a case which Roy once worked with his partner Jimmy, a tough detective played by Crowe’s fellow Gladiator cast member Tommy Flanagan.

Dickey is a revelation as a harder-than-nails woman exploited by the US’s legal guardian system in an otherwise overcooked thriller

The “G” in this low budget revenge thriller is 72-year-old Ann Hunter. That’s “G” as in “Granny”, a nickname given to her by her granddaughter. The joke is that Ann does not fit anyone’s stereotype of a granny. To call her hard-as-nails would be an understatement: nails can bend, but the G is harder, cold, mean and sarcastic. When she reaches for a bottle, dirty washing stacked up around the sink, no clean glass to hand, she pours her vodka neat into an empty yoghurt pot.

The G is played by character actor Dale Dickey, whose TV credits include Breaking Bad and My Name Is Earl. On film, she’s best known for a supporting part in Winter’s Bone, but I have to confess I didn’t recognise her. Having seen her in action here, I’m a convert. The G is heartless and unlikable, her battered face set in a permanent scowl – and yet Dickey conveys a woman shaped by her experience; there’s a backstory eventually about her childhood in Texas explaining the rage and anger. Her performance is a much-needed plus in a film that would otherwise lack a bit of substance.

An ex-con and his son spin around Casablanca trying to dispose of a huge corpse in Kamal Lazraq’s good-looking, if uneven, Cannes winner

A winner at last year’s Cannes, this by turns grim and quirky crime drama, from Kamal Lazraq, is set in Casablanca and lit like a Caravaggio painting. A macho, feckless and sporadically pious Moroccan ex-con (Abdellatif Masstouri) ropes his adult son (Ayoub Elaid) into doing a “small job” for a dog-obsessed gangster. Over the ensuing 12 hours, father and son spin around town with a problematically XL corpse, encountering a series of volpine/toothless/insidiously sozzled figures, who offer help (of sorts). All creatures great and small are fighting for their lives in this blasted landscape and, though the tension often flags, the actors, many of them non-professional, give consistently good face, especially Masstouri, who resembles a leathery, bushy-haired John Garfield.

In cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema