Predestination

Until it spirals out of all logical control, the Spierig Brothers' expansion of sci-fi legend Robert A Heinlein's 1958 short story All You Zombies is a thoughtful, if wonky, small-scale epic of retro-futurism. On his final time-travelling assignment to 1975, a temporal agent (the Spierigs' Daybreakers star Ethan Hawke, on blazing form) must stop the elusive Fizzle Bomber terrorist blowing up Manhattan while recruiting an enigmatic magazine agony aunt (an astonishingly multi-levelled Sarah Snook) into his organisation. The less said about the ornate plot the better, which bends gender as elaborately as it takes time through every decade of the mid-20th century. The Spierigs move seamlessly between classic film noir and vintage speculative fiction, the barfly wordplay and quirky imagination on show only intensifying the disappointment of a convoluted climax probing human identity while attempting to unravel time-travel paradoxes.