The last time we met Lars von Trier, the earth was being smashed by a rogue planet. Then before that, in Antichrist, Wilem Defoe was having his testicles smashed and Charlotte Gainsbourg was cutting off her clitoris. Time to put the children to bed, because we have the final part of the ‘depression’ trilogy - Nymphomaniac, where it’s Charlotte Gainsbourg’s turn to get smashed, this time by hundreds of penises, one of which happens to belong to Shia LaFuckingBeouf.

Yep, that’s right, Shia LaFuckingBeouf; the weasley, barely sentient kid from Transformers. Thankfully, contrary to his terrifying promises when the film was cast, we don’t get to see his penis, but we do get to see a porn star have their penis grafted onto his crotch via the wonders of CGI. Ah, what a great job for the tech wizards. ‘What did you do today, darling?’ ‘I’m working on Nymphomaniac, the new von Trier film.’ ‘Oh, that’s exciting!’ ‘Yeah, I’m pasting a porn star’s erect penis onto Shia LeBeouf’s crotch as he has simulated sex.’ ‘Oh...’

So yeah, it’s little weird having the kid from Transformers fool around with a girl and then have von Trier suddenly cut to a very artistic shot between LaBeouf’s legs where you can see his massive stunt penis have full penetrative sex.

And now as you shift uncomfortably in your seat and try and change the subject, you ask me how his acting is. Has he matured into a fine thespian? Like fuck he has. His acting is immature and unconvincing and his attempt to perfect an English accent is gut-wrenchingly embarrassing. For half a second it sounds okay, then it sounds fucking awful and then it sounds like he’s swallowed an Australian. It’s one of the worst vocal performances I’ve heard. Just either cast an Englishman in the role or have him speak in his normal voice. Make up some bullshit reason for why an American is living in the UK.

LaBeouf’s undetermined age doesn’t lend him any credibility either. We first see him as a teenager and then we see him as an adult. Funny thing is, though, that as a ‘teenager’ he doesn’t look any different to when he’s an adult. LaBeouf is one of those unfortunate people who looks like he could be aged anywhere between 12 and 35. It’s hard to take him seriously as either a teen or adult.

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stellan Skarsgard don’t fare much better. Gainsbourg mumbles morosely into a cup of coffee and Skarsgard comes across as a pretentious simpleton. Yes, that is a contradiction but von Trier somehow manages to achieve it. While Gainsbourg is recounting her experiences as a teenager where she fucked an entire train-load of men, Skarsgard is comparing it to angling and talking about Fibonacci numbers. It’s Iike von Trier has made a fuck-happy Forest Gump.

But the wraparound story of a sex-obsessed individual recounting their exploits to an avid listener reminds me of Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon. In that film, Peter Coyote tells his story to a salivating Hugh Grant. But while Bitter Moon is joyfully trashy, Nymphomaniac is po-faced. It somehow manages to make sex seem like the most depressing thing in the world. It also doesn’t have the emotion and tragedy of Bitter Moon (at least not in this first part). At heart, Bitter Moon is a deeply sad film. Nymphomaniac, meanwhile, is half joke, half depressed rant.

It also suffers from a man’s deluded idea of female sexuality. There’s a scene where two girls, one of which is our ‘heroine’ Joe, are going through a train, trying to fuck as many men as possible. It’s a competition between the two women. Whoever fucks the most guys, ‘wins’. It’s something that only a man would come up with. Sport fucking. Fucking like it’s a match between Liverpool and Manchester United.

While the portrait of female sexuality is misjudged and adolescent, the portrait of male sexuality is just depressing. None of the men have any willpower. None of them are able to control their impulses. One man, who’s travelling back on the train to see his wife, is powerless to stop our heroine from giving him an earth-shattering blow-job. Everyone here is just giving in to their most basic instincts.

Perhaps the only ‘normal’ character is Joe’s father. A seemingly ordinary, decent man, he shares a love of nature with his daughter and is attentive and kind. But even here you can kind of sense that something is off. At one point he catches his daughter looking at book of female anatomy - she’s looking at the clitoris. Her father smiles but doesn’t say anything. While nothing overt happens, their relationship feels a little incestuous.

But this is perhaps the most believable part of the film. This feels like a genuine human relationship. Joe even lets her father repeat stories she’s already heard many times before just to make him feel better. There’s love there. And this is maybe why Joe engages in joyless sex. She wants to make men happy. She needs their attention.

One of the most plausible sequences in the film is when Joe sleeps around in her father’s hospital. In order to escape the pain of her father’s demise, she repeatedly fucks a hospital employee. But while this feels convincing, von Trier has to be his puckish self and include a saucy detail once Joe’s father dies. Joe becomes aroused and we see a dribble drip down the inside of her leg.

But this is how fucked up this film is. The star performer in this movie is Christian Slater! The guy who was Uwe Boll’s muse in Alone in the Dark and who began turning up in direct-to-video clag like Hollow Man 2. He’s miles better than Skarsgard and Gainsbourg. Miles better. It kind of blows my mind.

With her father dead, Joe decides to pursue Jerome (Shia LaFuckingBeouf). He’s an absolutely worthless humanoid - a vain, greasy, arrogant nincompoop. Why any woman would desire this individual, I don’t know. But sex addicts rarely make sound decisions, so I shouldn’t be surprised that Joe would seek attention from him. Regardless, it’s difficult to watch these scenes because the acting is so damn wretched. And the ending of the film, with Joe crying, ‘I can’t feel anything’ lands with a dull thud. Did you ever feel anything, Joe? Did you really?

I admire anyone who attempts to do something different with the horror genre. Say what you will about The Blair Witch Project, I think it’s an excellent film. With a very limited budget, they made a creepy campfire yarn. Then you have The Shining, which is almost an arthouse flick. Anything that gets away from the cheap shocks and familiar beats that hobble the majority of horror films is incredibly welcome.

Which brings me to Antichrist; Lars von Trier’s latest film. Coming from the crazy genius who made Breaking the Waves, The Idiots and Dogville, you’d expect something a little off the beaten track. And he doesn’t disappoint.

The opening sequence is the complete opposite of his Dogma work. Filmed in black and white and in slow motion and with Handel on the soundtrack, it resembles a commercial for a fragrance. It’s achingly beautiful. But then to snap you back to reality and to remind you that you’re watching a von Trier film, you see a couple making love. And then to further ram this point home (literally) you see an erect penis thrusting in and out of a vagina. Filmed in extreme close-up, it’s a rather jarring image, but of course this is what von Trier wants to do – he wants to shock you and to piss you off a little. But this explicit image also helps the scene to get away from clean, sanitised Hollywood sex where there are no cocks, no oral sex and couples have simultaneous orgasms after 90 seconds of intercourse. It reminds you that this is an animalistic act.

The scene also shows that sex is a selfish, self-absorbed act – caught up in its fire, everything else gets relegated to the background. And so as the couple make love, their young child manages to climb to a window and falls out. The mother even climaxes as the child is dying. The way it’s juxtaposed, it kind of suggests that sex equals death – that something dies when you make love. I’m sure this is true for some poor bastards but it certainly doesn’t apply to the majority of the population.

Apparently von Trier was heavily depressed when making this film and when the child accidentally (or maybe not accidentally – the way its filmed it looks like a suicide, even though the child here is a toddler) kills himself, he inadvertently knocks three figures to the floor. One has ‘Pain’ written on it, the other one has ‘Grief’ and the final one says ‘Despair’. This is what the child is freeing himself from at such an early age. It’s also what he’s inflicting upon his parents. Maybe the depressed von Trier also wishes he could be liberated from these feelings.

What follows is a war between the sexes. The man, played by Willem Dafoe, is a therapist and wants to understand his wife’s feelings (the wife is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg). They almost immediately begin clashing, the wife saying that only now does she interest him. Before this horrible tragedy occurred he’d been a distant figure in her life – he paid little to no attention to her or their son. But whether this is the case or not, both of them express their grief in different ways. Dafoe throws himself into understanding his wife and the woman, quite understandably, becomes a nervous wreck. But although the ranting and raving would suggest that Gainsbourg’s character is more deeply affected by the child’s death, this isn’t true. Dafoe does the typically male thing of throwing himself into his work in order to suppress his feelings.

This ‘work’ involves Dafoe taking his wife to Eden, their log cabin in the woods – he discovers that she’s terrified of the forest and decides to treat her with exposure therapy. The scenes where we see how the wife feels about Eden are magnificently filmed. They’re hyper real and almost painterly – the woods look terrifying, but beautifully so. Contrast this with the scene where the characters actually travel to Eden. Here the woods look dull and uninteresting. It’s a very imaginative and successful way of showing how we build things up in our mind.

Once the film gets to the cabin itself it enters Strindberg territory, with the couple continually jousting. Unfortunately, though, von Trier is no Strindberg and some of the exchanges are clumsy or just plain bad. A line that had me wincing was when Gainsbourg says the following: ‘You shouldn’t have come here. You’re just so damn arrogant.’ With Gainsbourg’s weedy, lifeless voice (I haven’t heard her sing, so I hope her singing voice has more conviction) the line lands with a conspicuous thud. And things like ‘Nature is Satan’s church’ sound sub-Herzog.

The film is more successful when it expresses itself visually. There’s a graphic shot of a deer giving birth and a jarring image of a bird being consumed. And then later there’s a bit where a fox talks to Dafoe. On paper it sounds ridiculous, but the CGI is easily some of the best I’ve seen for a long time.

Whether Antichrist has anything meaningful to say about male/female relationships is hard to say. There’s so much symbolism and the characters behave so irrationally that you have to wonder whether this is just von Trier screaming wildly into the abyss or he’s simply having a laugh. Either way, the film, for me, is a success because of the insanity of the piece, not because it spoke personally to me.

One of Antichrist’s themes is the nature of women. In the film, Gainsbourg’s character writes a thesis to denounce the treatment of women across the ages but eventually proves that women are evil. And Gainsbourg’s character, in the final act, degenerates into psychopathic hysteria. At one point she decides that Dafoe is leaving her and so she then gets him excited, begins fucking him and dismounts so that she can smash him in the groin with a huge piece of wood. He passes out but he’s still aroused, and so in graphic detail we get to see her wank him off and make him come while he’s unconscious – the cherry on the cake is that he ejaculates blood.

Following this, the wife attaches a grindstone to Dafoe’s leg by bolting it to his ankle. You see what these sneaky women do; they hobble us and weigh us down! And then in a hilarious scene Dafoe crawls into a foxhole as his wife tries to dig her way into it with a spade while screaming, ‘How dare you leave me!’ Damn possessive women. If they can’t have us, they’ll destroy us. Oh, and she storms about bottomless. Fear the cunt.

Worse follows. We find out that Gainsbourg’s character was fully aware that their child was roaming about while they were making love. And we even find out that she made the child wear his shoes back to front, thus beginning to deform him. As a result of all of this, we get a close-up of Gainsbourg cutting her clitoris off with some scissors. Enjoyment of sex has apparently brought her nothing but misery and she no longer wants any part of it.

Dafoe manages to remove the grindstone from his leg and strangles her to death before burning her body like the witch she is. Again, I have no idea if von Trier is having a laugh or if he’s seriously suggesting that men would be better off burning their women.

The final image of the film is of loads of faceless women streaming past Dafoe and entering the woods. Oh no, there are more of them! And they’re all the same! This faceless evil is neverending! Mothers and wives just keep on coming!

Despite this, it would be a mistake to interpret Antichrist as a misogynistic film. Defoe’s character initiates the scenario that creates this meltdown. Rather than let his wife manage her grief and provide quiet understanding, he bullies her into accepting his therapy. He dominates her at every turn until she finally snaps. Consequently the film is more misanthropic than misogynistic.

But if you want to cling onto the interpretation that Antichrist is anti-women, there’s a Charlotte Gainsbourg quote you should remember: ‘A crying woman is a scheming woman.'

Body of Evidence is about a trollop who likes to fuck rich old men. She shags one in particular who has a weak ticker and who later pops his clogs. As a consequence, she’s put on trial for murder. Is she a killer? Did she screw the man to death?

On one side we have Willem Dafoe who thinks it’s no crime to be a great lay. On the other we have Joe Mantegna who thinks that Madonna herself is a deadly weapon – she’s no different to a knife or a gun. So according to him, the second the old man impaled Madonna, she impaled him with her magnificent screwing abilities – she didn’t stab him in the heart with a knife, she stabbed him in the heart with her vagina.

With this death by pussy theory voiced by the cops, Madonna is taken to trial. She’s either an innocent widow or she’s a lethal shagging machine.

It’s pretty obvious from the start that Madonna is a guilty-as-fuck black widow. But in time-honoured movie tradition, Willem Dafoe falls for her.

Body of Evidence tries to differentiate itself from other fuck happy erotic thrillers by introducing some kinky sex. We have nipple clamps, hot candle wax and oral sex on the bonnet of a car. But because the filmmakers have no interest in character or psychology, these sex scenes end up being empty attempts to titillate.

One such scene is the one where Madonna pours hot candle wax on Willem Dafoe. I guess someone could argue that the scene is about power games, or the link between pleasure and pain, or Dafoe’s self-destructive urges, but instead it’s a scarily earnest attempt to be sexy. We have lingering close-ups of the actors, we have candlelight and in the end we have the orgasmic pay-off. But the scene fails on even the most basic level (to at least give you a boner) because you have to watch the weasel-faced Dafoe gurn like mad as the smug, gap-toothed Madonna pours hot wax all over his knob. Sure this may be the best sex he’s ever had, but all I can see is the horrifying sexual gratification of the Green Goblin, something that’s enough to pour cold water on anyone’s lap (if the dead eyes of Madonna hadn’t already done that for you).

Another scene has Madonna squatting on Dafoe’s face as he lies on shards of broken glass. I’m sure a lot of people would be thinking, ‘Hey, that must smart a bit!’ But no, everything is explained in an earlier scene. You see, as a kid, Madonna liked to crawl through thorns to get her claw-like hands on strawberries. According to her, because of the effort it took to get them, they tasted even sweeter. And so it is for Dafoe. Writhing on broken glass makes Madonna’s cunt taste even nicer.

The pussy-eating scene is again rendered somewhat horrific by the gurning that occurs. However, this time the culprit is Madonna. Her gap-toothed throes of ecstasy leave much to be desired. (A special note for trivia buffs: in this scene Madonna does a Sharon Stone and shows her minge. Good for her.)

But while the cunnilingus scene features some pretty unappealing facial gymnastics, the scene that precedes it features Madonna’s one good bit of acting. You see, Madge is pleased with the work that Dafoe has been doing. Her lawyer has been acting like a little terrier. And so then in a crowded elevator Madonna rewards him with some clandestine wanky-wanky. I say it’s Madonna’s one good bit of acting because as she’s secretly tossing Dafoe off someone says goodnight to her and she cheekily says goodnight, too. It’s the one time that Madonna’s dead eyes have a sparkle in them.

Examples of Madonna’s incompetence as an actress are legion, but the example that springs to mind is when she talks to Dafoe about animal sex. ‘Have you ever seen animals make love, Frank? It’s violent. It’s intense.’ She’s obviously trying to make this bit of dialogue sound steamy, but she sounds like a simpleton who’s watched a little National Geographic. The line delivery is just so flat – badgers fucking are sexier.

I also like the way that Madonna blandly asks Dafoe is he’s scared right before she fucks him – she has him tied up. The only way she could scare me was if she sang the theme song for Die Another Day.

But of course, Dafoe is anything but scared. This is his wildest fantasy come true. I mean, his wife is played by Julianne Moore, and although she has an amazing body, she has a silly poodle-like haircut. Therefore it’s totally okay to cheat on her.

The first sex scene is preceded by one of my favourite pieces of symbolism. Dafoe sits in his car, spying on Madonna, possibly wrestling with his conscience (if he has one). He then sees a curtain billowing in the wind. The way it’s filmed, the curtain looks exactly like a vagina opening. Yes it’s this sight that gives Dafoe the courage to ditch his staid life full of cardigans and missionary position sex and embrace a new one full of hot candles and subterranean fuck fests.

But before Dafoe gets carried away with this amazing new lifestyle, he should have perhaps listened to the hilarious testimony of Frank Langella. He’s another rich old man that was involved with Madonna and he was another rich old man that had a bad heart. And in court he tells the story of how she tried to fuck him to death. He says that she would shag him a little and then before he could come, she would stop. And then she would fuck him some more and stop again. Over and over she did this until he was feeling ill. Now you might feel sorry for this guy. Oh, how Madonna took advantage of me. But he should have just mentally manned up. He should have thought unsexy thoughts in order to lose his erection – hell, he’s pretty old, I’m sure it couldn’t be that difficult to say hello to Mr Floppy. He should have just thought about football scores or rotting corpses or Madonna’s performance in Dick Tracy. Hey presto, boner gone!

Alas nothing will get rid of Dafoe’s erection. He even resorts to rape. Yep, this ordinary family man is so enraptured with his gap-toothed lover that he assaults her when she begins wanking in front of him. And to make the scene even more ridiculous, Enya-style music plays on the soundtrack as he prepares to bugger her. There’s lots of ‘Ooooh, ooh, ooooooh, oh’ Celtic-style nonsense.

However, even more hilariously, the music changes to ominous choral chants once the forced bum fucking begins. Suddenly the soundtrack sounds like something out of The Omen. It’s all very strange.

The strangeness doesn’t last long, though, and the film has a very conventional ending – Madonna gets shot and killed. This isn’t as awesome as it sounds and is something of an anti-climax. Indeed, the only good thing about the ending is when Madonna gets barged into a massive terracotta pot. It’s something I never knew I wanted to see until I saw it.

I guess one of the main debating points when it comes to American Psycho is whether the murders are reality or fantasy. Before I read the book, I was firmly of the opinion that everything was in Bateman's head. But after reading the novel and watching the film again, I've swung the other way. Everything is very real. After all, the whole point of the film seems to be that Bateman exists in a society that is so overwhelmingly self-absorbed that it doesn't even listen when he's begging to be caught. No one believes him and no one cares.

A factor that initially clouded matters was the way that everyone confuses the identity of the people they associate with. Bateman gets confused for other people, he pretends to be other people and no one seems to have a clue who they're really talking to. It's a nice little dig at the conformity of the 80s – people are homogeneous – but it also ensured, when I first watched the film, that I wasn’t sure whether I could believe what I was seeing. I mean, at the end of the film Bateman talks to his lawyer, but his lawyer doesn't even know who he is. Yet his lawyer apparently had dinner with one of the people he killed. But this is easily explained. In a world where people are continually lying and name-dropping, and a world where people are so conformist that their identities are interchangeable, mistakes are easily made. Therefore Bateman is a psychotic murderer trapped in a personal hell where no one believes him and where there's no one to put him out of his misery.

But despite the lack of clarity as regards the reality of the story, the film is a resounding success, maybe more so than the book. The book is pretty good but it's self-indulgent and excessive. And while that's the point – the 80s were shallow, get it? – I can only take so many descriptions of suits before I want to hurl the book across the room. "He was wearing a…" Plus the film gets rid of most of the gory killings. And while I'm sure there were a few nutters out there that got themselves riled up about that, focusing more on the satire of things benefits the film immensely.

But whether you prefer the novel or the film, the message is the same: contrary to Huey, conformity is bad.

A couple of times Bateman says that he wants to fit in, but in actuality he has nothing but contempt for the people he works with. All the time he's competing, trying to outdo everyone with his business card, his suit or his haircut, but no one even knows who he is. He's not really a person. So his anger at being a non-person that's overlooked and outdone spills over into murder. It's one of the few releases he has.

Sex is another release. The scene with the prostitutes is hilarious. It's more like masturbation than anything. For foreplay he demonstrates his understanding of Phil Collins and during the act itself he's continually looking at himself and narcissistically flexing his muscles. It's the American Dream, baby – sex, a buff body, hookers and, er, 'Sussudio'.

But on the subject of the music, I like the Whitney Houston speech even more. I love how emotional he gets – it's like he's reciting some pretentious music review he's read – and I like the way that you cut from his tears to him having vigorous sex with a drugged woman.

But speaking of Bateman's speeches, I also like the way he quotes restaurant reviews. There's no original thought at all. He's just a suit, a haircut and lots of second-hand opinions. The latter is best illustrated in the Espace scene where he gives off a long speech about how American society has to return to traditional values. The audience is well aware of the irony, but Bateman isn't.

But Bateman's a perfect embodiment of Reagan's America. He's fearful of homosexuals, hateful towards the underclass ("Why don't you get a job, Al?") and he earnestly spouts empty platitudes ("Just say no") while taking lots of drugs and having lots of sex. He's a hypocrite and a liar but he's 100% all-American.

And like some American males he has a strange idea of masculinity. He's a misogynist, a racist and he's oversexed, but he pampers himself like a woman. But although he takes a lot of care over his body, his mind is left to rot. But then again, when you're a privileged young man whose work consists of going to lunch, reading Playboy and listening to 'Lady in Red', perhaps your mind is best left well alone (maybe his choice in music is what drives him to insanity – listen to Collins and DeBurgh and be damned forever). But I also like his childish need to impress. If only he could get into Dorsia… And I also love Bale's reaction in the scene where one of the prostitutes asks him how much his apartment cost. He snaps that it's none of her business but then smugly says that it cost a lot. Along with Whitney Houston, it's the funniest moment in the film.

And it's the humour that makes the film worth repeated viewings. Sure there's a lot of fun to be had in the preposterous violence, but I keep coming back for lines like, "Huey's too black sounding for me."

Now if you don't mind, I've got to return some videotapes...

What a lovable pair the MacManus brothers are. They're Irish, they're religious and they horse about at work, hitting each other in the face with pieces of raw meat. What cracking fellows. Oh, and in their spare time (surprise, surprise) they drink a lot. The only problem is that some Russian Nikolai Volkov look-a-likes want to buy their favourite bar. They can't be having this, so they beat the guys up and set one bloke's arse on fire. It's just a bit of crack. However, the Russians don't see the funny side. The day after this incident they chain one brother to the toilet and take the other down to the street to kill him. But then the chained brother frees himself, and from the top of the apartment building looking down onto the alley, he drops the toilet down onto the head of the Russian shooter, a man who is cackling like a cartoon villain, and then jumps several stories down onto the other, hitting him with remarkable precision. Then the other brother beats the Russians to death with fragments of the toilet. As if it needed stating, the film is a piece of shit.

Watching The Boondock Saints is kind of like performing a DIY lobotomy. You begin the experience as a normal human being, but by the end you're a drooling, shambling, glassy-eyed zombie. It's just a shame it's so hard to find someone to put a pillow over your face once the credits have rolled.

But what makes the film so bad? Well, the idiotic morality doesn't help. Apparently it's okay to kill people as long as you think they're evil and as long as you believe in god. But what constitutes evil? Well, instead of going after politicians, corporations and religious leaders, the brothers decide to kill gangsters. Well, fair enough, they're bad guys, but the brothers themselves aren't any better. They manhandle women, they terrorise priests and their best mate gropes the breasts of an unconscious woman. Wow, these are such great guys. However, their dumb mate makes up for the groping by slaughtering more wicked men. So that makes it alright, then.

But their dumb mate, a 'reformed' Italian gangster, also threatens his girlfriend with a gun. Remember, he's on the side of the righteous. And earlier on in his life, he stood by and watched a man slaughter an entire family. Of course, this non-response is justified by him being scared. However, at the very beginning, a priest says that the indifference of good men is just as bad as the evil of wicked men. Therefore, with this bloke turning a blind eye to violence and then embracing it, he's surely doubly evil.

Another stupid moral detail is that the brothers are supposedly protecting the Irish community. Yet this is a community, in the film, that is proud of not talking to the police. That's more indifference. So why should I give a tinker's fart about a community that wont help itself and which takes pride in allowing gangsters (the church is certainly included in this, as they're the biggest gangsters of all) take control of their lives?

But the most dubious piece of morality occurs at the end. The two brothers and Billy Connolly terrorise a court while spouting religious claptrap. Apparently they're right and you're wrong. You have to do what they say. "These are not polite suggestions. These are codes of behaviour." So do I get shot if I use prophylactics? I mean, the Pope hates those things and he's god's messenger on Earth.

But although I could spend ages ripping the religious nonsense to shreds, the film also fails spectacularly in terms of entertainment. For instance, there's the idiotic way it's filmed. Basically you go from crime scene to crime scene and then in flashback you see the murder itself (in mind-numbing slow-motion). It's incredibly repetitive. And Willem Dafoe's character, the FBI agent who's assigned the case, is a cheap rip off of Gary Oldman's character in Leon – he listens to classical music as he puts everything together (he also reaches for the sky in ecstasy when he solves puzzles). But to try and add some colour, the character is gay. However, for some reason, despite being fierce Catholics, the brothers don't mind this fact. They call him a good man. Maybe it's because he's the sort of homosexual who just loves bum sex – he doesn't like hugging. But again, it's further evidence of the way the brothers pick and choose what's good and what's bad – of course, we all do this, but most of us aren't going to shoot people if we don't agree with their personal choices.

What's really bad, though, is the action. There's one scene where the brothers and their mate are standing there having a shoot-out with Billy Connolly. No one moves but even at point blank range no one can hit the target. And what makes it even more stupid is that Connolly's character is supposed to be a lethal killing machine (he's kept in prison like Hannibal Lector). Someone give him some shooting lessons.

And then there's the scene where the brothers fall out of an air duct, and hanging from a rope, manage to kill a bunch of gangsters. Only someone with an IQ lower than Forest Gump could find any merit in that.

And the less said about the scene where Defoe re-enacts a shoot-out by using his fingers as guns, the better.

But what makes this film so depressing is the canonization of the main characters. Troy Duffy (the writer-director) loves these guys. He thinks they're great. And he thinks we should feel the same way - we should think they're wonderful. So there's no objectivity here. There's only juvenile, masturbatory hero-worship. Now I'm sure some people would point to the end titles and say, well, what about the vox pops? Well, the couple of notes of criticism are so belated and lackluster that you can tell Duffy's heart isn't in it. You just know he's with these guys all the way. Anything they do is okay in his book.

But perhaps even more depressing than Duffy's hero-worship of his idiotic creations is the fact that the film has garnered a strong cult following. I have no idea what they see in the film, because all I see is rightwing religious claptrap fed to the audience through moronic characters and preposterous situations. To admit to liking this film is to admit to being an imbecile.

Bob Crane is always going on about what a likable guy he is. Well, he may be polite and he may have a bland charm that appeals to housewives and poindexters, but can a man who cheats on two wives and ruins two marriages really be classed as likable?

And Bob Crane also goes on about how normal he is. Well, yes, sex is normal and knocking about is hardly immoral, but this is a married man with children who is sleeping around. And not only that but he's a man who doesn't seem to see anything wrong with his behaviour. Apparently everyone else has the problem. But he's also a man who tapes his sex sessions (sometimes illicitly) and who watches them with his best buddy. Likable and normal he most certainly isn't.

What comes through strongest in Auto Focus is the strange homoerotic relationship that exists between Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) and John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe). It's kind of a perverse love story. In the first scene they share, John almost serenades Bob. It's love at first sight. Then pretty soon afterwards they're scoring chicks, banging beaver and filming their exploits.

In fact, the two characters kind of complete one another. At the beginning Bob is curious but kind of naive – he has 'photography' magazines and is almost embarrassed when he goes to his first strip joint – while John is horny and self-assured, but, being a mere mortal, can hardly be guaranteed to score every time. So when the bumbling Bob and the confident John hook up, they make a pretty good partnership.

And at the beginning things go well. With Bob's celebrity and John's photographic equipment and electronic gadgets, they're bagging chicks and having fun. And at the start things are relatively tame – after years of dull marital sex, Bob is excited merely at the prospect of doing it with the lights on. But as things progress, the relationship between the two men gets more and more perverse. The first hint that this is more than mere macho tag-team screwing is the way they talk as they watch their tapes. John says to Bob, "Where have you been all my life?" While Bob says to John, "It's either him or me" (Bob doesn't like one of John's other customers - one of Bob's co-stars in 'Hogan's Heroes' - and wants John to choose between the two of them). This isn't a mere friendship.

Then there's the way that Bob gets outraged when he sees, via tape, that during an orgy, John has had his hand on his arse. When you're filming sex tapes with your best buddy and watching them together, it seems rather churlish to complain about getting your bum groped.

But although they have a bit of a lover's tiff over this, the pair soon hook back up again. And then, in an extraordinary scene, they watch another one of their tapes. At the time, Bob is saying how much he misses his wife and child. But immediately afterwards, he and his best buddy begin masturbating as they watch one of their recordings. And then as they're abusing themselves, they begin to debate who the woman is and where it was filmed. To them, this is completely normal. It's ordinary. No wonder neither is capable of maintaining a healthy relationship – they've chosen the surface (photography and sex tapes) over anything with real meaning. The focus truly is on themselves. To hell with the subtle pleasures of a loving relationship; everything here is focused on orgasm.

But that's one of the conundrums that Auto Focus presents. Where you're famous and when women are lining up to have sex with you (fame is the world's best lubricant), how can you be expected to exercise self-control? Surely that's every man's dream. Well, it probably is the dream of most men, and it can hardly be a surprise that Crane cheated on his wives, but what makes him so extraordinary is how completely lacking he is in self-awareness. He talks to priests, Christian magazines and his agent, seemingly sincere in the lies he spews ("I'm a one woman man." "Bob Crane is a good guy." "I'm normal."). He really does think that his wives are being unreasonable in expecting him to be true to them. He really does think that keeping an album of the women he's slept with, and showing it to other people, is okay. He really does think that there's nothing strange in watching sex tapes with his best buddy and wanking himself off as he contemplates the peculiar way that the female mind works. His life is evidence of what happens when a shallow man with little intelligence is given fame.

But although the character is shallow, Greg Kinnear's performance is complex. He really doesn't a put a foot wrong. He's got the easy charm and wide-eyed confusion down pat. He plays Bob as a man who is always sincere, who is always polite and charming, but who is constantly hurting those around him. And his performance is also incredibly seedy. I particularly like the way he leers at his son's girlfriend. The man has no self-control; no idea of social mores. And there's a great piece of acting when he gets a barman to put 'Hogan's Heroes' on so that he can pick up a couple of women. He feigns surprise so well when one of the women asks him whether he's the man off the show that I wouldn't be surprised if Crane fooled himself into thinking that he didn't in any way manipulate these women when he was picking them up.

I also like scene when he receives a call from Disney. They want him for a film called 'Superdad'. The way that he juggles sleaze and respectability is impeccable – right before the call he talks to John about making a sex movie, and then he shows John his penis. Yep, that's 'Superdad'.

But ultimately it's quite a sad film. Crane's death, being beaten while asleep, is both brutal and pathetic. Yes Crane wasn't a good man, nor was he a normal one, but you can't truly call him a bad man either. He certainly wasn't vindictive. He was just a sad, seedy little man who died a sad, seedy little death. His crime was being clueless, stupid and far too horny.