From its fable-like opening to its really rather schmaltzy Christmas closing moments and all the sudden acts of violence in-between, Anders Thomas Jensen’s RIDERS OF JUSTICE consistently delivers the unexpected. Markus (Mads Mikkelsen) returns home from military deployment to look after his teenage daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heik Gadeberg) after a train crash kills her mother. But very soon an eccentric mathematician (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and his colleagues turn up on his doorstep with plausible evidence that the crash was far from accidental. Anders Thomas Jensen’s totally janky films won’t be for everybody, but stories about a mismatched group of people growing to become a weird surrogate family are one of my favourite loose genres, so this was just my bag. Jensen walks a tonal tightrope throughout, making the funny stuff almost painfully so and the dark stuff black as pitch, all of which will leave you exhilarated, exhausted and strangely satisfied. SSP