Bruno

The hype might seem nigh on impossible to live up to, but Brüno delivers on its promise to be the most shockingly hilarious film since Borat.

The comparisons are inevitable. Sacha Baron Cohen's characters work best when the subject is oblivious to the joke, but after the surprise success of the mockumentary Borat most people now know who Baron Cohen is and how he operates. And whereas Borat's charming naïvety caught people with their guard (if not their pants) down, Brüno's screaming campness tends to cause people to raise their defences. As a result, it looks as though Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles have had to work a lot harder to get their material.

The film's storyline - what there is of it - is merely a needle with which to thread together a series of outrageous stunts. Brüno is fired from his Austrian TV fashion show Funkyzeit after gatecrashing a catwalk show in Milan. Shunned by the superficial fashion world, he decides to do something more worthwhile with his life: go to LA and become a celebrity - "ze most famous Austrian since Hitler" no less.

What Brüno lacks in plot, it makes up for in point, satirising homophobia and lampooning the vacuous pursuit of fame for fame's sake via the adoption of African babies and charitable causes. Brüno even goes to "Middle Earth" to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem and confound leaders on both sides by confusing Hamas with hummous. And in a stunt that could surely have gone badly wrong, he also attempts to get himself kidnapped by a terrorist organisation in Lebanon in order to see his hostage video go viral. 

It's essential - but hardly comfortable - viewing. You'll watch most of it through splayed fingers, and at times you'll need a spare hand to pick your jaw up off the cinema floor. Dan Rookwood