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80Jessica Biel has great fun with the American adventuress, while Kristin Scott Thomas is truly scary as her nemesis and mother-in-law.
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Quick! Noël Coward--sage or supercilious bitch? No matter where you stand, Stephan Elliott's deliciously cheeky screen adaptation of one of the satirist's lesser-known jabs at the British upper crust will charm your pants off.
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Elliott has created a wonderfully rich battle for propriety in Easy Virtue. The humor might sting, but the pain is worth the pleasure.
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80In its cold-eyed assessment of the English aristocracy Easy Virtue has none of the lurking Anglophilia found in Merchant-Ivory movies.
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80An effervescent entertainment that marks a welcome return for "Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" director Stephan Elliott after a nine-year absence.
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75Director Stephan Elliott uncorks a rare vintage of laughs tinged with heartache.
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75The dialogue has an edgy wit, although it has no ambitions to be falling-down funny. Here is the Odd Couple formula applied in a specific time and place that make them feel very odd indeed.
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75Gets better as it goes along.
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75It's a pleasure to watch such top-notch actors deliver Coward's sparkling wit.
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75Sure, there's a plot, but it's a secondary element to the lines the actors deliver. Only Oscar Wilde has the same bite. Fortunately, Elliott understands this, which makes Easy Virtue go down smoothly.
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67The picture itself is only mechanically breezy.
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60While its tone occasionally wavers and there are some wobbly performances, this has moments of true lightness, and a welcome sense of whimsy often missing in the costume genre.
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58This may have been fertile grounds for satire in 1925, when Noel Coward's drawing-room melodrama Easy Virtue debuted on the stage, but by now this film version feels rather done.
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58Easy Virtue has aspirations to be much more than a comedy. It wants to flay, if only with a penknife, the entire British class system.
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50The upside of a Coward-powered letdown is that I had plenty of time to contemplate one particularly improbable fact about Easy Virtue: that it had a previous incarnation on film. As, of all things, a silent picture.
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50Anything but light on its feet. It lumbers instead of dazzles, drags where it should feint and jab.
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50Full of forced jocularity and drawing-room hissy fits, with its cast parading around in vintage threads and antique cars, Easy Virtue is a close-to-insufferable souffle based on the 1925 Noel Coward play.
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50iIf you can ignore a ridiculously overbearing soundtrack - a big if - the film's a pleasant bauble. Still, those coming in cold may be forgiven for thinking they've wandered into "Atonement" remade as a farce.
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50Shot in country fields and interiors of fading Georgian glory, Easy Virtue has enough traces of Coward's wit to keep you hoping for the first hour or so, but then the film collapses under the weight of too many misguided innovations.
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50We could all use a little more Noel Coward in our lives. But the fizz falls flat in Stephan Elliot's adaptation of a lesser-known play, which, while blithe enough, has little spirit to speak of.
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Blame the wafer-thin adaptation by Sheridan Jobbins and director Stephan Elliott. What might've been a scrumptious, chocolatey dessert of a movie -- a Noel Coward delite -- is instead a scoop of lemon ice, not filling, faintly sweet and mostly water.
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50If you're looking for a simple-minded farce with campy overtones, this 2008 feature might be your dish.
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50Easy Virtue needs a strong center to justify its celebration of American effrontery, and Biel lacks that prideful edge.
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40It may tell you everything you need to know about Easy Virtue to note that Hollywood hottie Jessica Biel receives top billing over veteran Brit thesps Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth.
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38Easy Virtue may be a bauble, as Larita's described at one point, but Coward's examination of hypocrisy demands real skill. The style should suggest "whipped cream with knives," as Stephen Sondheim once described "A Little Night Music." Elliott's film is more like curdled milk with a spork.
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38A crass, heavy- handed and -- most unforgivably -- largely laugh-free adaptation of The Master's infrequently revived 1924 comic melodrama.
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