The World of Henry Orient

Heavenly Creatures + Wes Anderson minus anything truly disturbing or funny.

Great performances fail to spark a wishy-washy tale of a bit of everything.

Peter Sellers is his usual comic genius, and Angela Lansbury is evil incarnate- unfortunately when they're not on the screen the film drags. There's a certain Heavenly Creatures-esque creepiness about the whole thing, but mixed with the lightness and the twee it just doesn't know what it wants to be and ultimately doesn't work.

Ode to the onset of female adolescence, when girlish silliness begins to discover the pangs of desire but without the libidinal economy having yet been rearranged. But another theme also gradually reveals itself: a man grows tired of his wife’s taste for adultery, so decides to instead take his 14-year-old daughter as his new girlfriend, for as long as she’ll have him. Sounds interesting and charming, perhaps, but the story and characterisation are inadequate, and the humour is nonexistent.

Could not get into this at all. The girls were just too annoying.