Paul Schrader’s collaboration with Bret Easton Ellis is a caustic take on a Hollywood that lives off the dashed hopes and broken dreams of an ever-renewing influx of chumps and suckers. Sex and violence reign in this stylish and uncanny vision of Los Angeles, all smooth surfaces and digital grain.

The bumbling antiheroes of this gleefully unhinged crime comedy find the American dream more out of reach than ever before. They all have their twisted reasons for chasing it anyway. In the way these determined fools catastrophically bungle their mission, Paul Schrader finds both humor and pathos.