Aladeen (Cohen), the dictator of a tin-pot North African oil-rich banana republic is commanded by the UN to address the assembly and explain the country's suspicious nuclear weapons program. His number two, Tamir (Kingsley), sees this as the prime opportunity to get the bumbling leader out of his way once and for all and arranges for Aladeen to be replaced by a double - a hillbilly goat farmer named Efawadh (also Cohen). Lost in New York, Aladeen befriends a local refugee advocate, Zoey (Faris) and stumbles upon the ex-head of his nuclear weapons program, Nadal (Jason Mantzoukas). With the aid of Nadal, Aladeen hatches a secret plot to foil the secret plot that saw his life taken from him, and takes a minimum wage job in Zoey's hippie grocery store for cover.

The Dictator sees Sacha Baron Cohen back in fine form, after the misstep of Bruno (whose biggest crime was not Cohen's execution but his fame standing in the way of the subterfuge required to pull that film off). The film wraps unmistakable Sacha Baron Cohen humour into a fairly conventional Hollywood structure, a feat that legendary comedy director Larry Charles deserves particular credit for (particularly if you ever saw Ali G Indahouse, which struggled to achieve the same). By opting for a more conventional narrative than the reality-meets-fictional-character used in his last two outings as a leading man, Cohen has again found a voice for his boundary stretching humour (as well as a reason to flop his naughty bits out in public).

In 1904, a young Russian woman arrives at a Zurich clinic. Manic and hysterical, she desperately struggles with her handlers, howling like a wild animal inside her horse-drawn carriage amidst the shrieking strings of the soundtrack. It's a frightening, alarming - and decidedly Cronenberg-ian - opening to the film, and our first glimpse of a woman we soon learn is Sabina Spielrein (Knightley).

Spielrein has been sent as a last resort to the clinic of Carl Jung (Fassbender), a disciple of the father of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud (Mortensen). Equally driven and seduced by the challenge of curing his beautiful-but-bonkers new patient, Jung uses Freud's methods to great success: Spielrein is soon calmed, and her highly intelligent mind liberated. As the relationship between the married Jung and Spielrein becomes dangerously intimate, Jung begins to question the validity of Freud's theories. Having only known Freud through his writings, he travels to Vienna to finally meet the great man himself. Before long, the two titans of early psychoanalysis are locked in an ideological struggle for conceptual supremacy: is it all about sex, as Freud famously postulated, or, as disciple and soon-to-be-rival Jung suspects, is there more to it than that?

Deceptively calm and cerebral on the surface, A Dangerous Method is an absorbing, provocative exploration of matters of the mind as only David Cronenberg could deliver. Yet, despite the fascinating subject matter, the screenplay is admittedly a little dry and dialogue-heavy. Fortunately, riveting performances from Mortensen, Fassbender and Knightley in particular make it all worthwhile.