Rambo revisited

Flashbacks of a Fool
Between missions as 007, Daniel Craig elected to produce and act in this debut feature of his friend, commercials director Baillie Walsh. The result spins the tale of a washed-up movie star who is summoned home to attend the funeral of a childhood buddy.

And what a curate’s egg it turns out to be: a woozy rites-of-passage drama that seems one-part languorous to two-parts drunk, drifting sluggishly between sun-blasted present-day California and sun-blasted 1970s England.

It’s like an awkward (and how could it not be awkward?) marriage of The Cement Garden and Beaches; an intriguing bit of driftwood, an exotic wreck. Matters wrap up with a bizarre scene in which our hero listens with frowning sadness to the story of a woman who was decapitated by a lorry and then had her head stolen by a passing fox. After which he shakes his head (so much strangeness in the world!), picks up his bag and prepares to return to Bond.—Xan Brooks