Equinox

After a dip into the mainstream with Mortal Thoughts, the wildest card in American cinema is back on his own bizarre terrain. This modern urban fairytale is a beautifully ambivalent re-telling of The Prince and the Pauper. Modine is the separated-at-birth twins (both of them), one a hood whose dream life - moppet children, a cooing fashion-plate wife (Singer) - is coupled with violent megalomania, the other a cringing wimp who can't bring himself to date his best friend's anguished, poetry-reading sister (Boyle). The whole is held together with a plot about an aspiring writer (Ferrell) on the track of her first real-life drama, and by an atmospheric soundtrack (Terje Rydal, Ali Farka Toure) that accompanies the characters' hypnotically crazed manoeuvres. M Emmet Walsh steals the show as a garage boss in a drolly choreographed homage to Jacques Demy. Delirious stuff.