Demi Moore’s haute-couture maven attracts the attention of a gang of contemporary Robin Hood type clothes robbers in Riley’s fashion biz satire

Here is an entertaining, if very exhausting fantasy-caper about the fashion biz from Boots Riley, a madcap mile-a-minute melee of unadulterated ker-aziness. You might need a couple of ibuprofen and a lie-down afterwards. Demi Moore perhaps thought she was here getting a gamey starring role, comparable to her Oscar-nominated turn in the beauty-industry satire The Substance. In fact, the way the film is structured and edited, Moore is hardly more than a returning cameo, though a potent one.

She plays Christie Smith, a billionaire couture designer who has an office in a trendily designed city block which leans over at an experimental angle. Christie is the object of obsessive attention from “boosters”: supercool young outlaw women who, nettled by her arrogance, shoplift her clothes from upscale stores and sell them on at knockdown Robin Hood prices. They are Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), the latter having the ability to, by holding her breath, turning herself into a white woman who is less likely to be challenged in a store; an interesting metaphor for what Frantz Fanon might have called black skin, white masks.

Colman stars as a depressed and bullied fisherwoman in medieval England. Fortunately, Peter Dinklage’s basketmaker delivers the answer to her dreams – an Alexander Skarsgård made of wicker

The spirit of mystery author Shirley Jackson is interestingly revived in this peculiar folk-horror romance, adapted from a 2006 story called The Wicker Husband by British writer Ursula Wills. It’s almost funny but not exactly, and almost disturbing but not exactly, occupying a strange and intriguing Venn-diagram overlap between macabre horror and sentimentality. Yet devotees of bucolic British screen-scariness will note that it is, after all, about a wicker man.

The scene is a fabular medieval-effect village that could be in central Europe or England, where there are bizarre patriarchal rituals, like the placing of metal collars on new brides. A depressed middle-aged fisherwoman (fiercely and naturalistically played by Olivia Colman) lives alone in a remote cottage and regularly brings her unappetising tench and gudgeon to market, where she is mocked and bullied by the nasty, closed-minded locals, including Richard E Grant as a lazy and incompetent doctor. Chief among her tormentors is the spiteful tailor’s wife, an elegant, sharp-faced woman played by Elizabeth Debicki.

Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave put in the performances of their lives in this film originally banned for obscenity that highlights the violence of power

‘I could never be Satan’s boy. I haven’t the humility.” The speaker is Father Urbain Grandier, the 17th-century French priest accused of witchcraft, stylishly played by Oliver Reed, in Ken Russell’s scabrous 1971 classic; it is now restored and rereleased in its complete form after years of censorship. It comes from an era when movies, playing in high-street cinemas, still had the power to shock, to position that shock in the polite cultural mainstream and to compel serious discussion about whether that shock – or, conversely, a ban – was justified.

The Devils is based on a true story of politically directed mass hysteria, adapted by Russell from two literary works: Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting’s stage play The Devils. Of course it is obscene; obscenity is the glowing sulphurous paint which Russell is applying to the canvas. It is about obscenity – but the obscenity does not reside in the sexualised images of the crucified Christ or naked nuns disporting themselves; it is the violence of authority that is shown to be obscene. The idea of martyrs or heretics being burned at the stake has long been an accepted fact recounted in U-certificate history lessons, and a punishment which survived well into the European enlightenment. Russell shows you what it might actually look like and that is to involve a confrontational assault on good taste.