God Bless America

This tar-black, deeply funny satire from Bobcat Goldthwait - known to many of us as Zed from the Police Academy films - stars Joel Murray as a superficially diffident cubicle worker who is fired from his job and then diagnosed with a brain tumour. With nothing to lose, he embarks on a bloody road trip and sets about eliminating the flotsam of trash culture, which includes reality-TV stars, right-wing pundits and inconsiderate cinema-goers. Sitting halfway between the traditions of worm-turning movies such as Joel Schumacher's Falling Down and slaughter-spree flicks like Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, the film's chief pleasures are a brace of fine performances from Murray as the frustrated everyman and Tara Lynne Barr as his youthful Bonnie-ish partner in crime, as well as some pleasingly tart dialogue. And for anyone who's fumed in a cinema seat while some yahoo gabs on their mobile, Murray's ultra-violent solution to this cinephile's nightmare is the stuff of joyful fantasy.