I first watching this ahead of a particularly gruelling close shift at Dishoom in the summer of 19. Sat in the breakroom eating dal, stewing with rage the more I thought about the precious afternoon that had been wasted on such a cruel, heinous movie.

Six years on, having now escaped the woes of hospitality, I was curious to revisit this outside of the furore of that hot discourse summer. And, well, it's still completely rancid. The farcically racist…

Had a much better time with this than expected — "anti-brutalist, pro-Zionist" might otherwise have been concocted in a lab specifically to vex me, and it did, but there's thankfully enough to chew on here to make this more than just an ideological exercise in auteurist bravado and large-format celluloid fetishism.

Plenty to ire, then. Most of all, quite astonishingly, Joe Alwyn: a Transatlantic boxcar and "fat-headed son" (a line reading impeccably delivered by Guy Pierce, whose brandy-acting here hit…