Entertaining, very off-beat film will change the way you think about music-video directors: Spike Jonze was best known for his clips for Weezer and the Beastie Boys before he made this. John Cusack stars as a puppeteer whose marriage has descended into a dull, though odd, routine. He takes a mind-numbing job in the ultimate bad office environment, but things only start to look up when he discovers a strange tunnel behind a filing cabinet: it turns out to be a portal into the body of actor John Malkovich (who gamely plays himself). Cusack and his seductive coworker (Catherine Keener) start charging admission, and all hell breaks loose.

This is an ideas film, really: the principal enjoyment comes from the increasingly bizarre directions in which scriptwriter Charlie Kaufmann takes things. The central idea is a great setup, but Kauffman never lets it stagnate: every time we seem headed for some kind of status quo, a new development ups the ante. And the central premise isn't even his best idea: Cusack's Lewis Carroll-inspired office environment works as a beautifully executed and sustained visual joke, and also as a neat externalisation of the constrained state of mind the character finds himself in.