The Worst Person In The World (R21)

127 minutes, opens Feb 24 exclusively at The Projector, 4 stars

As the saying goes, Julie is trying to live, laugh and love.

It has not been easy. In following her compulsions, this citizen of Oslo, Norway, fears she is becoming a caricature of the privileged Westerner - she has become delusional, demanding and destructive. Could she be the worst person in the world?

The opening scene gives a quick sketch of Julie (Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve in a stellar performance), a person of contradictory impulses born into a middle-class family. In university, she can dump one course in favour of another in a heartbeat. And she takes the same approach with boyfriends.

A few years later, Julie appears to have found stability. She lives with graphic novelist Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie). She hopes to be a writer. Soon, she again feels the tug - she must find her authentic self, even if it means destroying everything she has built.

In this bone-dry comedy about growing up believing that it is possible to be - or to have anything - Norwegian film-maker Joachim Trier explores the idea of individual freedom as it applies to an ordinary person and invites the audience to judge her.

The film has been nominated for Oscars in the Best International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay categories. At the Cannes Film Festival, Reinsve won the award for Best Actress.

Julie is not damaged by trauma, nor is she crippled by doubt or anxiety. This sets her apart from recent fictional women, such as Phoebe Waller-Bridge's main character in the British comedy series Fleabag (2016 to 2019), which say that extraordinarily bad choices must have a source in extraordinary suffering.

Julie's troubled relationship with her parents could explain or even excuse her behaviour, but Trier never draws a direct link, so she may never fully shrug off responsibility for her actions.

He illustrates her troubled relationship with her father in a particularly electrifying way. Instead of using a flashback or a dialogue-heavy showdown, he sets up a father-daughter confrontation inside a drug-fuelled hallucination. It is a shocking, blackly comic episode laden with symbols of decay and blood.

If Julie is unlikeable, it is because Trier planned it that way. Depending on your viewpoint, she is selfish and sociopathic, a modern woman exercising her freedoms or a hopeless romantic - sometimes all of these things.

Reinsve's sensitive portrayal, however, makes it hard to blame her. It feels wrong to fault a woman who expresses such cathartic joy when she puts herself first - even if it comes at the expense of others.

Blacklight (PG13)

105 minutes opens on Feb 24, not reviewed

Travis Block (Liam Neeson) works unofficially for the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation as an operator who extracts agents from sticky situations by any means necessary. He becomes trapped in a conspiracy that places his family in danger, unless he can uncover the secrets his employers are trying to hide from him.