Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Zazie Beetz, Steve Coogan, Harry Lawtey, Leigh Gill, Ken Leung, Jacob Lofland, Bill Smotrovich, Sharon Washington, Alfred Rubin Thompson.

Imagine the longest middle finger to be attached to the largest, most muscled, sizeable hand, and then seeing it for all its worth as it is raised up in the face of all, a large moment in which we understand we have been probably taken for a ride; one set of the audience will see it with anguish and fury, feeling the ridicule personally…the other knowing at the end that the joke was on them and revelling in the cinema reveal in which the emotional needs and wounds have been opened and the flesh ripped apart.