J.G. Ballard’s effed-up fable of sex, car crashes and ‘psychopathology’ found the perfect adaptation thanks to David Cronenberg. Both summation and subversion of his career-long themes, it’s teasingly transgressive, infamously too much for some, but mordantly funny and icily elegant. James Spader is a deadpan delight as the initiate into the world of auto-erotica, but the MVPs are composer Howard Shore and DoP Peter Suschitzky, who give Cronenberg’s thesis its metallic sounds and visuals.