Director: Rupert Sanders. Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Michael Pitt, “Beat” Takeshi Kitano, Pilou Asbæk, Juliette Binoche, Peter Ferdinand, Anamaria Marinca, Michael Wincott. 12A cert, 107 mins

We could talk about the style in Ghost in the Shell all day, and confine the plot to brief brackets. (It’ll do.) As Blade Runner did before it, this slinky, cyberpunk action flick makes its style the entire statement, pondering a future of human-robot synergy simply by visualising it in as much eye-popping detail as possible. The ghost of the title – derived from the Japanese manga comics by Masamune Shirow, which were heretofore adapted as anime features – is the human consciousness of the heroine.

Played by a black-cropped Scarlett Johansson, she is physically a robot in all ways but the cerebral: the mind, and soul, of her old human form has been ported into a cyborg shell. Her job, as an asset of the Hanka Corporation which performed this fusion, is to weed out “terrorists”, though the term is interestingly synonymous throughout with anyone who could be considered hostile to the company, whether they have fair cause or not.