Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Justin Timberlake
Director: Richard Kelly
The film: Southland Tales is well-known for its disastrous appearance at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005. Confusing, convoluted and devoid of anything resembling a coherent plot, the fantasy-thriller is set in dystopian near-future in which the US has become a police state after twin nuclear attacks on Texas.
One the most maligned films ever to have made its premiere in competition on the Croisette, with critics mauling it all the more because it failed to deliver on the promise shown by director Richard Kelly in his debut, Donnie Darko.
Two years and a re-edit later, Southland Tales emerges, astonishingly, in more or less the same shape. Shorter by 15 minutes from its original version (it still clocks in at 144 minutes), Kelly's film remains as baffling as ever.
Set in the run-up to this year's presidential elections, the film depicts an America wracked by paranoia, with the post-9/11 Patriot Act having bloated into a system named US-IDENT - an omniscient surveillance mechanism capable of monitoring and intruding into every aspect of people's lives.