Though few of the subsequent scenes have quite such a refreshingly adolescent sense of callousness and while it

Though few of the subsequent scenes have quite such a refreshingly adolescent sense of callousness, and while it is only fair to concede that it bored and irritated a fair number of more mature critics, Alex de la Iglesia’s film is an absolute hoot, with all the energy and unabashed daftness of a feisty graphic novel.Alex Angulo, who acts his part with a beguiling mixture of meek good manners and sociopathic violence, stars as Father Angel Berriartua, a visionary professor of theology – or, probably, nutter – who, after years of painstaking numerological work on the Book of Revelation, has concluded that the Antichrist will be born on Christmas Day 1995 in the Spanish capital. Since it is already Christmas Eve, he needs to get his skates on if the universe is to be saved, hence that rapid-fire career of street crime (which is meant to con the devil into thinking him an eager recruit to the forces of darkness), and his recruitment of two colourful sidekicks, a slobbish Death Metal fan called Jose (Santiago Sagura) and “Prof Cavan”, a famous charlatan with a TV show dedicated to the occult. Their subsequent adventures are violent, misogynistic, hallucino- genic and very, very silly: HP Lovecraft as staged by the Marx Brothers. Eat lead, Miracle on 34th Street.The week’s second agreeable surprise comes from Ireland: The Last of the High Kings (15), directed by David Keating, which manages to find colourful patches in the otherwise threadbare material of the sensitive- boy’s-coming-of-age story.

Its convention- al components include the dreamy hero (the American Jared Leto, not bad at all), the long hot post-exam summer of his 17th year, the girl(s) he yearns for, the family who just don’t understand how difficult it is to be young and doomed to leisure, the evocative soundtrack by the likes of Mott the Hoople (it is 1977, but Dublin hasn’t fully taken stock of safety pins and expectoration), and a band the local priest knows as the Tin Lizzies.Its less orthodox touches mostly concern the hero’s family: his father (Gabriel Byrne, who also co-wrote the screenplay) is a flamboyant actor of the kind who favours velvet smoking jackets, his mother (Catherine O’Hara) a romantic Nationalist bigot stuffed to the gills with enough under-informed historical bile to make a Noraid supporter feel thoughtful. There’s a juicy supporting cast, too, including Colm Meaney as a drunken and lascivious Fianna Fail candidate (people are making dark allegations about him, he slurs to a pal during a post-election binge, and he knows who the allegators are), and Stephen Rea as a mendacious taxi driver who once had that James Joyce in the back of the cab. Well worth a detour.A late arrival to the week’s releases is another addition to the Keanu Reeves oeuvre, which bears the uninviting title Feeling Minnesota (18). (Trivia buffs may care to know that it was inspired by a Soundgarden song.) Keanu, fetchingly bestubbled and not long out of jail, comes home for the gangster-enforced wedding of his disgusting older brother Sam (Vincent D’Onofrio) to an understandably reluctant young woman (Cameron Diaz).

Within minutes, Keanu and Cameron are thrashing away on the bathroom floor; before too much longer, they’re off on the road with a bottle of cheap champagne and a stolen dog. Sam follows, and soon people are hitting each other with unusual frequency. Its writer-director, Steven Baigelman, seems to be aiming for some sort of gritty farce. By and large, the results leave you feeling Oklahoma – bored to the point of despair.Londoners in search of an eccentric pre-Christmas treat could do at lot worse than visit the NFT, which is reviving the enjoyable Hong Kong hit A Chinese Ghost Story (15), made in 1987 by Ching Siu Tung. The naive story of a wandering tax collector who recklessly spends the night in a haunted temple, falls in love with a lissom ghost and, eventually, has to stage a lightning raid on hell itself in the company of the hardest Taoist priest you could hope to meet, it bursts at the seams with delightfully weird images: vampire-mummies dissolving into goo, flying heads and the lethal giant tongue of a tree demon. Fun, and curiously beautiful at times.Film details: Going Out, p14. “Her dancing style is a cross between marching on the spot in heavy mud and milking a very tall cow.” I managed to catch only one sentence of Monday’s Short Story (R4) as I hurried out, but that line, from Ioan Meredith’s Will You Marry Me?, was too good not to be scribbled down hastily, just in case it could be shoe-horned into this column The radio is a tyrant and a tease.

For every full programme I hear, there are a dozen jottings like that around our house: it’s time to use a few

Farming Today (R4) generates such notes almost daily. On Tuesday, I surfaced just in time to hear of another scare about the poor benighted cow. Did you realise that when cows are fed on silage, they ingest as much alcohol as if they consumed a daily bottle of Famous Grouse? No wonder they mooch about abstractedly and allow strange men to strap machines on to their udders.
And cows suffered yet another damaging slight in Monday’s Advent Calendar (R3), when Bishop Jack Spong remarked that not only are no animals mentioned in St Luke’s account of the Nativity, but there isn’t even a stable. The Christian imagination has generated the tradition of gently lowing cattle from the one word “manger”, which Luke does mention, twice. As we are learning, gratefully, to expect from this series, his remarks introduced a new (to me) and beautifully performed setting of a favourite carol. I was also reminded of my daughter’s early, cow-free version of the second verse, which began: “The battle below him, the baby awakes …