Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry ** Dir: Paul Tickell With: Nick Moran, Neil Stuke, Kate Ashfield, Mel Raido, Sophie Knijff, Shirley Anne Field, Mattia Sbragia 89 mins, cert 18

A determined attempt to film BS Johnson's best-known, or anyway least obscure novel, published in 1973. Paul Tickell directs in the punky, bloody-minded spirit of Derek Jarman and Lindsay Anderson. Nick Moran is Christie, a thin-lipped no-hoper living with his Alzheimer's-stricken old mum, Shirley Anne Field. Pissed on by the world, Christie is inspired by his evening class in accountancy to devise a personal double-entry book-keeping system in which he will record his revenges against life in the "credit" column.

The movie, like the novel, gives a plausible natural history of the anarcho-terrorist's victim-mentality mindset. Christie's story is wackily interleaved with the 16th-century history of double-entry book-keeping's inventor: Fra Luca Bartolomeo Pacioli, a double-entry narrative device which doesn't however cast much light on Christie. The rest of the movie however can't decide if it's a period-piece about the shabby filing-clerk world of the 1960s , or an up-to-the-minute 21st century world of computer laptops, with flashes of fantasy violence in the office - Lock, Stock meets Ally McBeal.

There is certainly something apt about the tatty and depressing Britishness of the film, but it's difficult to tell how deliberate this is. This release is happening alongside an important season of BS Johnson's own short films at London's ICA cinema. The best of these, You're Human Like the Rest of Them (1967), is Johnson's startling precursor to Anderson's If . . .