Requiem for a Killer

The Mélanie-Laurent-kills-people-in-eveningwear thriller is a newish subgenre, but the position of ‘Inglourious Basterds’ at Number 1 isn’t threatened by this inadvertently uproarious Hitchcock homage from France, in which the actress plays an opera-singing assassin. Beginning with a hit involving kittens and communion wafers, and getting steadily more bonkers from there, the emmental narrative plunges Laurent into the Agatha Christie-style setting of a classical music festival at a Swiss chateau. Her target: a Scottish baritone (Christopher Stills) whose whisky distillery is coveted by a British oil firm. (Don’t get too hung up on the details: ‘It’s worth several million pounds sterling’ is the script’s idea of business talk.) Cue a lot of inscrutable double-crossing, ‘Murder She Wrote’-level suspense and endless recitations of Handel’s ‘Messiah’ – well, you have to class things up somehow.