Literary and accessible, Showtime represents standalone, visual storytelling at its absolute best. Antoine Cosse's cinematic tale of a world-famous magician known only as 'M' blurs the lines between what is real and what is a trick. His complex narrative draws on recent lines of public intellectual enquiry into the power of collective memory, how myth and fable can be used to construct identity, and whether individual psychology can ever effect objective reality. Meanwhile, his illustrations simply astonish.