At the annual G7 summit, the seven leaders of the world’s wealthiest liberal democracies – the US, Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy, France, and the UK – get hopelessly lost in the woods one night while attempting to draft a provisional statement addressing an unnamed global crisis in Guy Maddin’s typically idiosyncratic political satire, the latest of his recent collaborations with brothers Evan and Galen Johnson, and co-produced by Ari Aster. Pitched somewhere between Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, and Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, with a few splashes of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead added to the mix for good measure, Rumours is a wildly inventive, playful and pointed concoction that defies easy categorisation. A terrific cast headed by Cate Blanchett and Charles Dance gamely commit to Maddin’s delightfully skewed vision.

Notes by David O’Mahony.