Before Canadian director Denis Villeneuve delivered big with this stylish, hallucinatory and utterly breathtaking sci-fi spectacle, back in 2008 he was wowing Bristol audiences at Encounters with his mind-bendingly perplexing short film Next Floor – a brilliant primer of a hugely gifted directorial talent that would go on to direct classics such as Incendies, Enemy and Sicario.

Picking things up three decades after the original Blade Runner left off, LAPD officer K (Ryan Gosling), a limited-lifespan replicant, has been tasked with tracking down and destroying first-generation models who can live as long as humans, and who are still illegally hiding out. But when he unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos, his discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former Blade Runner who’s been missing for 30 years.

Visually immaculate and swirling with themes as heart-rending as they are mind-twisting, Villenueve’s stunning follow up to Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult classic appeals to our intellect as well as our sense of adventure.

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