Spring Breakers

This candy-coloured delirium opens with a wet and wild montage of well endowed young women gyrating in slow motion as Neanderthal jocks cascade cheap lager over their naked breasts. Knowing this information you may struggle with the next statement, but I’m deadly serious: Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is the smartest, most daring and aesthetically gorgeous deconstruction of narrative cinema you’ll see all year. The plot has more U-turns than a George Osborne budget. Just when it looks like you’re in a Larry Clark-like teenage wasteland you’ll suddenly find yourself in Deliverance country. But wait – now we’re in a Tony Scott movie. Often these story-180 degrees happen within a single scene; you’ve got to keep your wits about you or the film will give you whiplash.

Spring Breakers reaches an ecstatic and comedic crescendo with James Franco, as Alien, a gold-toothed gangsta rapper, sitting by a swimming pool playing a white baby grand piano and crooning a Britney Spears ballad to three blond airheads, played by former Disney child stars. The WTF factor is compounded by the fact the girls are wearing pink, unicorn embroidered balaclavas and brandishing semi-automatic submachine guns. If Michael Mann was to take a lot of hallucinogenics and shoot a Girls Gone Wild video, it might look something like this. [Jamie Dunn]