“You see, the thing is, Brian, that God is a hateful god. Must be, because if God is good, then why is there evil in the world? Why is there pain and hate and greed and war? Doesn't make sense. But if God is a nasty bastard, then you can say, "Why is there good in the world? Why is there love and hope and joy?" Well, let's face it. Good exists in order to be fucked up by evil. The very existence of good enables evil to flourish. Therefore, God is bad.”

In what may be a pained wailing swan song of the non-achievement culminations of the human race, these disparate explorations of masculine solipsism and free market fallout crescendo into a whirlwind of choked laughter and jaw-agape disbelief. With the looming monolithic shadow of failed governance cloaking every frame in life-sucking darkness – on one hand that of a Post-Thatcher wasteland London and on the other the laughing-gas-era of the Clintons – we are thrown headlong into the gray matter of two tornado-like beings tearing through every sorry fool caught in their path. Delivered with masterful precision in the hands of Mike Leigh, and with what may seem to be a Universal-Studios-paint-by-numbers shrug of Tom Shadyac, the beating hearts racing throughout the rage and synapse-crackling madness of a combined David Thewlis and Jim Carrey help the films coalesce into something so horrifically prescient it aches in your marrow. What remains after the storm are the moments of reprieve, the genuine connections and fleeting glimpses of love before the inevitable destruction returns, the lust and desperation for understanding if meaning exists outside of human invention, the inarguably humorous nuggets of wisdom that somehow emerge when even the last measly shred of hope seems a laughable impossibility.