Suburbicon

The Coen brothers may have provided the lean, mean script, but George Clooney provides the human heart of his seemingly kitsch but really quite venomous black comedy, which tilts at the rose-tinted nostalgia of Trump's America. The setting is the new town of Suburbicon in the late 1950s, where the middle-class idyll is suddenly shattered by the arrival of a respectable African-American family. As the neighbourhood voices its racist concerns, a dark tale of murder and treachery begins to unfold in the house behind, as family man Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) - a typically meat-headed Coen klutz - finds his plan to murder his wife Rose (Julianne Moore) and marry her sister Margaret (also Julianne Moore) unravelling at a rate of bloody knots. By itself, the Double Indemnity-style plot would make Suburbicon an entertaining but minor work, but the escalating racial tension that simmers in the background gives it bite and topicality, reflecting white America's sinister obsession with maintaining its own privilege.