Violette Nozière

The Chabrol film for people who don't really like Chabrol films. Based, like the infinitely superior but much maligned Les Noces Rouges, on a real-life murder case - the 18-year-old Violette poisoned her parents in 1933 - it begins brilliantly with a characteristic demolition job on the dreary, furtive squalors of petit bourgeois life that drive Violette to murder. But the political and social implications thus raised are never really confronted. Instead, leaving all sorts of questions unanswered and avenues unexplored, Chabrol ('I fell in love with Violette Nozière he roundly declared) settles down latterly to canonise her for no very apparent reason as a patient and saintly Grizelda. The period evocation is gorgeous, but ultimately it's an empty slice of sleight-of-hand.