A wordy, quirky love story that pretty much set the template for American indie movies. I have a soft spot for Hal Hartley and remember seeing this 15 years ago in a former porno cinema in Picadilly Circus after a blazing row with someone. The Unbelievable Truth took me away from my spikey grouchiness and beamed feelgood existential playfulness into my eyes.

The scene where Adrienne Shelley wakes up and yawns to the soundtrack of a bomb going off is one of my formative cinematic experiences. It captured that late 80s angst we all had about nuclear war, perfectly.

The Unbelievable Truth is a bit like Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter in that it’s about peoples’ assumptions about each other and the partial histories that are then manufactured to fill in the gaps.

It’s a wonderful film with a very stylised script and approach: flattened out and ironic, but warm and witty. The two lead actors hold the film completely and look amazing even now all these years later, in black clothes, furrowed brows, and piercing eyes.

It’s reassuring to see misfits come out OK in the end. Even if they have to go through mass murder and nude modelling to get there…