Drawing on the rich and lurid vein of Neapolitan fairytales, Matteo Garrone’s lavish, eye-popping fantasy thrusts its stellar cast into a wildly baroque world of kings, queens, hags and monsters.

A sumptuous, seductive and macabre re-telling of Giambattista Basile’s classic Italian fairytales, this is a patchwork of three fantastical stories about distressed monarchs. One king (Toby Jones) breeds a giant flea and accidentally marries his daughter off to an ogre; another (Vincent Cassel) allows his rampant sexual desire to lead him into bed with an old crone; and a selfish queen (Salma Hayek) sends her king (John C. Reilly) to battle a sea monster in a bid to conceive an heir.

Gloriously mad and sumptuously erotic, this hilariously created world of fairytales for grown-ups is an outlandish, grotesque and beguiling fantasy world like nothing you’ve seen before. Deliciously dark, wickedly funny and outrageously entertaining, this had critics eating their hearts out (you'll get that if you've seen that press image of Salma Hayek...) at last year's Cannes, and you'll likely be seduced by its spell, too.

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