Easy Virtue (PG)

Noël Coward's plays are surprisingly amenable to revival – Private Lives still sounds fresh and funny – but whatever fizz this adaptation by Stephan Elliott sought to uncork has gone flat in the glass.

Jessica Biel plays the American racing driver who arrives at the ancestral pile of her new husband (Ben Barnes) and gets right down to duelling with his fiercely patrician mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) and thwarted sisters. Coward's arch dialogue sounds merely twittish and clumsy in Elliott's screenplay, and the atmosphere struggles to survive the jaunty (and ghastly) "jazz-age" versions of modern hits such as "Sex Bomb".

Colin Firth as the paterfamilias ambles around as if he's just visiting the set, barely bothering to act, or even to shave. Biel at least looks great in the clothes, and has the good grace not to wince whenever the sexless Barnes breaks into song. Altogether a shambles, and perhaps uniquely in the Coward canon, it features not a single laugh.