Grace of Monaco

Nicole Kidman stars in this hopelessly flawed portrait of Hollywood legend Grace Kelly, set in the early days of her marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco. Tim Roth delivers an archetypal study of the Napoleon complex as the governing head of the principality, and with supporting characters drawn in equally rough strokes (including Robert Lindsay's cigar-chomping Aristotle Onassis), it's left to Kidman to hold it together. Alas, she's two decades too old to pull off the youthful naivety that gets Grace into trouble in her new, formal surroundings. She looks stiff in all the wrong ways, a designer clothes horse in a glitzy pantomime, while director Olivier Dahan (La Vie en Rose) misses the finer points of the political crisis unfolding in the background, as France threatens invasion. Dahan pushes the theory that Grace smoothed things over with her good hostess skills, while Alfred Hitchcock (Roger Ashton-Griffiths) tries to lure her away with a script for Marnie. Dahan also looks to Hitch to try and inject some urgency into proceedings, especially at the culminating banquet, but it's all about as exciting as soggy cucumber sandwiches.