Hotel

A sort of 'Grand Guignol Hotel', if you'll settle for the likes of Hayek and Schwimmer as modern-day Garbos and Barrymores. Another Figgis DV experiment, this 'life meets art' movie-movie about a project to update John Webster's Jacobean dramaThe Duchess of Malfi flirts just occasionally with Timecode-style split-screens. But far from choreographing its action he lets the cast off the leash to chew up one another and the scenery. Hard to make much sense of the florid mix of murky hotelier intrigue (the setting is Venice and the Lido's once glamorous art deco Hungaria Palace Hotel), crude film-biz caricatures and eye-rolling improvisation, nor indeed of the baiting hypocrisy in Figgis' indulgence of exploitative nudity and supposedly Dogme-style 'bad lighting'.