Miranda

There comes a moment in the imagination of fools when love conquers all, just as there are people who believe that a fish can mate with a peacock and winged pigs fornicate in trees.

Take Frank, for example. He is what you might call ordinary - no, he's not that interesting. He works in a public library and daydreams about things that will never happen to him, like rumbustious sex with a dancer from New Jersey.

Miranda is that dancer, except she's not, because this is a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't movie. She appears to be working for a charm-greased English crusty (John Hurt), while having an odd, possibly perverted, liaison with another middle-aged businessman (Kyle MacLachlan) who is obscenely rich - or, should that be rich and obscene? Her job appears to be flogging condemned properties that she doesn't own to gullible tycoons - do they exist in the real world? - and then scooting before men in hard hats come and demolish them.

This is a film that defies logic. How could an international con artiste end up under the duvet with the nerd prince from nowhere? OK, she's lonely in the fetid dark of fraudulent practice and needs TLC, like curd needs whey. That she chooses a chap who looks like he couldn't tell a nipple from a teaspoon seems masochistic to say the least, except he does have one thing going for him - he believes. He believes in love.

Because he is played by John Simm, who, ever since Human Traffic, has retained the loyalty of the nation, sympathy staunches those feelings of wanting to run out of the cinema screaming. Christina Ricci, as Miranda, walks through the part like a disgruntled floor manager who has mislaid her key to the executive toilets. As for Hurt and MacLachlan, how are the mighty fallen? Paying the rent, or whatever actors do with their money, has become an excuse too far.