Upon this unusual plot, which manages to seem at once slender and wholly implausible, the South Korean director Park Chanwook has constructed a highly wrought, low-lit piece of gothic, worrying away at our senses without pausing to check that his story makes any sense.

NEWYORKER: Oldboy

The peg for the piece was the scrapping of a line of supposedly diet biscuits, "Taillefine", or "Slender Silhouette", from the French firm LU, and their replacement with a line called "Belvita", a made-up word with whiffs of the good life.

ECONOMIST: European politics