Imagine The Da Vinci Code remade by a philosophy student, set mostly in Oxford bedsits and starring Elijah Wood in the Tom Hanks role, and featuring the world’s most unerotic sex scene – then you have an idea of the eccentricities that define The Oxford Murders. Wood is an American philosophy student who interrupts a bracing lecture from John Hurt with the exhortation: “I believe in the number Pi!”

Soon after this show-stopper, both Hurt and Wood are entangled in a spate of extremely tame serial killings that implicate the theories of Wittgenstein, Heisenberg and the very possibility of truth itself. Naturally, a local dimwit detective (Jim Carter) is baffled, and it’s up to Wood to save the day. Utterly stupid but strangely endearing.

15, 104mins

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