Reviews

This is the best comedy I've ever seen. Written, perhaps as a serie a clef, by ex-academic Andrew Davies, who went on to adapt Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice etc for the BBC, it is also the best comedy ever set in the health centre of a provincial British university.

This is an unpleasant film that makes little sense. And it stars the director's wife. And a pop singer. But, along with Hitchcock's Under Capricorn and Polanski's Chinatown I find it simply beautiful in its use of colour.

There is something quite wonderfully arresting about a film like this that fully embraces the artifice of cinema, in which the actors are less flesh than painted, animated, aluminium mannequins.

I saw this in a superb venue in Paris, But DTS sounds, comfortable seats and even the prospect of getting wet outside couldn't keep me staring at this mess for more than three quarters of an hour. The problem was not that it was a mess, nor that it betrayed its source - Brian dePalma's Mission Impossible did both of these things, but at least that mess was spectacular. This one lacked all sense of occasion and this was clear from the very opening shot of R.Fiennes' thin head in a fat bowler hat. With such vicious editing the film had no chance, but even so, I can't think of the most minor fragment of the first 45 minutes that has charmed its way into my memory, except the swivel-headed teddy-bears; but I don't want to give anything away. What I will reveal is that I did walk out, but didn't get wet - just slipped into the showing of Wild things (shown in France under the arresting title of Sexcrimes) in the next screen. Splendid time I had. But who's going to avenge the Avengers?