Nick Pinkerton

Taken together, the whole thing is good for approximately one laugh, generated by the shabbiest CGI reptile since "Anaconda."

More irksome, the clips, often improperly masked or displaying conversion issues, are rarely drawn from the best available materials. This scruffiness would be easily forgiven if there were something sufficiently "innovative" in Cousins's approach to transcend the cut-rate production value. Instead, this Story, for all its claims of rewriting, is too reliant on received film-buff wisdom.

Like any good study in couple's psychopathology, a familiar relationship is visible here, but in a parodic, mutated form.

A send-up of a communal project made of vague goals and empty postures that is ultimately indistinguishable from its target.

Laughton, of course, is elegant rotundity in motion, a naughty, moonfaced cherub in his drunk scene, later sweetly surprised when finding himself elevated into a man by the Gettysburg Address, a recitation of which is the film's palpitating heart.

The novel and wickedly funny topic is mined for only a portion of its potential, but a little ironic astringency is certainly more unsettling than by-the-book slum drama.

"Love" is a quicksilver thing that can't be held in the present tense. It is somewhere between nothing and everything, and no one pinned down more of its complexities and contradictions than Maurice Pialat, hunting barehanded for slippery truths.

Chodorov follows the first-person tradition accordingly, entering the subject through his own early immersion in these films via his father, television presenter Stephen Chodorov.