A barber slashes the throats of his customers and tips them into eternity through a trapdoor. A near-robotic assassin, slaying those in his way, vengefully stalks a petty thief across Texas. War-scarred soldiers bring brutality and murder to the home front. Oilfields geyser with blood in a feud-riven, early-20th-century west.

What is happening out there in movieland? We don’t need a critic so much as a climatologist. Dark dramas of death, filled with demon-driven characters, fly through the skies. Every major American director seems to be hitching a ride on the hurricane. The Coen brothers’ previous two films were comedies, Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. Their new film is a brutal neo-western. Paul Thomas Anderson’s last film was the comedy, Punch-Drunk Love. His new film is a savage opera of greed and territorialism. Even George Clooney, who has singed the beard of Tinseltown before with mild incendiaries – Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck – has seldom acted in a film darker and more dystopic than Michael Clayton.