When Veronica’s husband (Viola Davis and Liam Neeson, respectively) is killed during a daring heist, she and the wives of the men he worked with discover money was owed to some particularly nasty people. And now they want it back. Where the title ‘widows’ might suggest women defined by their husbands’ absence, McQueen turns this idea on its head as Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki and Cynthia Erivo find empowerment and unexpected solidarity in tackling their men’s unfinished business.

Steve McQueen and co-writer Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl), offer a strikingly contemporary reworking of Lynda La Plante’s groundbreaking 1980s television series, relocating the action to Chicago, with a local election exposing race and class conflict, along with political corruption, in urban America. Robert Duvall and Colin Farrell are the Mulligans, heading up an Irish family who’ve long controlled and enriched themselves from city politics, while Daniel Kaluuya shows vicious bite as a character determined to change the balance of power by any means. An exacting, formally precise filmmaker, McQueen’s take on genre was always going to be something special; regular collaborators cinematographer Sean Bobbitt and editor Joe Walker help deliver a sleek and pacey film, with Hans Zimmer’s score adding urgency. Always deeply satisfying as a heist film, but never simply that, these ass-kicking widows have some glass ceilings to shatter into a million tiny pieces. (LFF)