Chromophobia

A starry cast scuttle around stately country piles, modish yuppie palaces and (for social balance) the odd bit of run-down urban squalor. It's an ensemble piece so there's lots of swirling sub-plots that – wait for it – are all inter-connected and come together at the end. Yep, it's Magnolia meets Crash, by way of Eastenders, the end result a peculiarly chilly mulch of bungled class commentary that rings hollow. An embarrassment of thesps soldier on regardless through plot strands involving dodgy dealings at a powerful law firm, dysfunctional familial relations and the neuroses and screw-ups of a bunch of rich pretty people. Performances are good but unremarkable - Ben Chaplin does the movie journo thing pretty well, looking crumpled and harassed while chain-smoking and swearing. Penelope Cruz and Rhys Ifans mooch around being poor and superfluous for a while. This is a brittle, ill-judged soap opera, unforgivably derivative of its more assured American predecessors. [Laura Smith]