LAURA

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS, BUT IF IT STOPS ANYONE FROM WASTING THEIR TIME AND MONEY THEN FRANKLY IT'S A MOVE WELL MADE

Not the old noir classic with Gene Tierney, but a late 70s piece of sub-Emmanuelle erotic fluff from the lens of the faintly creepy David Hamilton. In turn, that's not the David Hamilton from Radio 1, but the photographer who specialised (and for all I know still does) in very artful and not even a little bit porny nudes.

The biggest name here is Maud Adams, most notable for being one of the few people to play two entirely unconnected characters in separate James Bond films. But the role of extensive nude posing goes to the then 17-year-old Dawn Dunlap as her daughter Laura, innocent muse to her mother's one-time lover who's currently fighting a bad case of sculptor's block. She's also studying ballet and therefore the movie is entirely justified in including a group shower sequence. While the impossibly handsome sculptor wants her to pose for his latest nudey statue, Adams attempts to keep her away from the dirty old perv. Matters come to a head with an accident involving a studio fire and a faceful of weedkiller: because he can no longer see to work from photos, Laura lets him "see her" by touch - cue the rhapsodic final reel wherein a skinny teenage girl is fondled and squeezed at needless length by a bloke in his forties. But it's all very tasteful and artistic, so that's perfectly alright, officer.

I'm actually partial to an occasional bit of mild smut. But if the movie's core was any softer it would be an Angel Delight. The whole thing is shot in dreamy soft focus like a Flake advert, through a lens covered in enough Vaseline to grease a walrus. That's fine: it gives a nice visual ambience to the movie (incidentally not helped by the murky picture quality on the DVD), and it's complemented by a lot of syrupy easy-listening piano music from the Richard Clayderman school of supposedly sophisticated lift music. But not a lot happens, the acting and dialogue is fairly awful, and despite it looking very pretty, it's pretty boring.

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