You do wonder sometimes whether it is not a little too sweetly fetching for its own good. No one could have accused the Frears film of that.

Valmont, then, proves a mixed blessing; a sumptuous treat for the eyes, a quiet disappointment for the mind.

Colin Firth's Valmont is pleasant, a dreadful thing to say about one of literature's most magnetic seducers.

A humane movie about some of the most inhumane people in literary history; in its own way, that's a pretty remarkable achievement, though it never quite manages to argue why it's taking this approach.