Leslie Felperin

It’s all a bit too sanctified and safe – lacking in rock’n’roll edge perhaps – but Fortune-Lloyd’s core performance is deeply empathic and buoys the film up as it races through the stations of Epstein’s short, sharp shock of a life.

Love, to quote that woozy old ballad, is indeed a many-splendored thing that takes many forms — a multiplicity that Love the film is quietly alive to.

Here the actual transitions are quite nifty, featuring lots of bulging veins and grisly-looking in-between stages as people turn into different kinds of snarling mammalian creatures. However, once they are done transforming, the masks or make-up or whatever the actors are clad in are so ineffectual they end up looking like a bunch of underlit extras in Halloween costumes recreating The Purge while howling.

The comic timing and bonhomie of the ensemble is sort of infectious, and (what do you know) some of the songs are pretty darn catchy.

Tedious stretches of vulgar banter are interspersed with equally dull interludes during which people melt. Then it finally gets resolved after 85 very long minutes.

The script, by Roderick Warich and Kröger, isn’t quite as nifty as its famous models, but it has its own grim integrity, especially with the jarring last frames.

If you’re in the right headspace, the whole thing is quite entrancing. Still, it’s also an extremely rarefied sort of entertainment.

The drama sputters and fails to catch fire; it’s as if Gilford is far less interested in kindling things and prefers to just look at his pretty cast in a variety of lighting schemes from stark noontime sunglare to the golden hues of magic hour. That said, the toothsome cast is well worth watching, especially Plummer with his nervous smile and the incandescent Lindley.

The moral maths seem calculated in advance to ensure a by-numbers outcome, but it’s an absorbing puzzle while it lasts.

All in all, this is a powerful example of a bricolage-like editing technique that relies heavily on exploiting the copyright laws around fair use to create a prismatic, provocative style of cinema that’s very 21st century.

The film-makers never probe psyches very deeply, not even the parents’. It’s just one contemporary travelogue cliche after another, admittedly beautifully shot in super high definition.

The end result is so comically tawdry and silly you can’t but wonder if its all a bit of a tongue-in-cheek goof, a gag that Elizabeth Hurley at least seems to be in on, judging by her ripe, almost-winking performance.

Skincare is a worthy contribution to the growing microgenre of female-led beauty-themed horror, and some of us out here are ready for more.

Out of all the film’s many achievements, perhaps the most impressive is the ability to keep the tone balanced just on this biting point between tragedy and comedy in scene after scene.

While Paddington in Peru sadly lacks the absurdist wit and decidedly dark edge that elevated the first two Paddington movies, it’s serviceable enough given its limitations.

As visual wallpaper it’s serviceable enough, providing a constant backbeat of blam-blam gunshots and explosions, mostly at night.

The fight sequences are lethargic and feature a lot of extras waiting patiently for their cue to fall over dead. The Maltese architecture remains as lovely as ever; the dialogue is, however, shockingly bad.

By the end it’s nearly impossible not to shed a tear after the touching finesse and shape of this story.

Of course, the music is the main attraction and that’s served well, with long chunks of performance footage that aren’t sliced and diced as much as they would be in a contemporary rock doc.

The stunts are duly impressive and filmed with vim, but the party apparatchiks would probably be happy with how thuddingly sentimental the film is, and how conservative it is about family values.

While there’s much to admire here . . . the drama too often lacks the subtlety that distinguishes the British writer-director’s work at its best. Two hours long, practically to the second, this feels like a project that’s been excessively trimmed, snipped and tapered to fit an arbitrary running time.

Yes, it certainly is about her, but it’s almost as if everyone involved – Gabeira, people who were supposedly her closest associates, and even the director Stephanie Johnes – aren’t quite conscious of the fact that they’re also making a documentary about endemic sexism in sport.

The subject matter alone could be enough to trigger geysers of tears in viewers, but what makes Le Fanu’s direction especially impressive is its lack of sentimentality. Instead, she focuses on daily rituals — the little murmurs of gratitude and kindness, and the sense of exhaustion that stretches out for hours, days and weeks as one waits for someone to die.

Hardcore Ozon fans will have fun arguing about where exactly this falls in the ranking of his substantial body of work, but it’s surely somewhere in the top 10 or even the top five, a rock-solid demonstration of his control over storytelling, technique and ability to get the best from actors.

Usually anything this many generations into its evolution is pretty exhausted – but this is pretty good, or at least in parts.

No amount of budget could make up for the sputtering mess of a script, or the dead-on-the-inside expressions of the cast – apart from Rudolph who is consistently watchable.

Gorehounds will appreciate the film’s many beheadings and bloody murders.

If it’s lucky, Emmanuelle might find an afterlife as a kind of Showgirls for its generation, a great-bad movie that’s undeniably craptacular yet strangely endearing, a shameful pleasure in every sense.