Screened at the Fourcroft Hotel on August 4, this film served up lavish sets and spectacular, snowy, scenery, but its convoluted plot and flippant tone were bum-numbingly boring. In part the movie exploits any nostalgia we may feel about a world that varnished with the onset of World War One, a world which the protagonist Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) anachronistically clings onto during his inter-war adventures with the lobby boy, Zero, played by Tony Revolori (an upcoming star, RF reckons - and a name to watch out for in mainstream cinema). It's also a spoof concerning a lifestyle and old-school-tie code of conduct that is largely passé and which many in our ultra-pc zeitgeist would be ashamed to admit to harbouring a yearning for. But it doesn't work even if your take on the film is as a sort of 'Some like it Cold' version of the famous Marilyn Monroe comedy-thriller, 'Some like it Hot'. Foul language - mainly from the mouth of M. Gustave - is unconvincing and gratuituous and may be an unsuccessful ploy to draw contemporary audiences in. What a shame, given the cinematically-gorgeous backdrop, so much more significant a movie could have been contrived from this material. Next screenings at the Fourcroft are: 'The Monuments Men' - August 18 and 'The Invisible Woman' - September 1.