Verity

Ultimately, Verity is just plain fun. It's bloody, but not so bloody that it would be too much for those wary of horror movies; it has some very spicy scenes, but they never feel gratuitous. It's unlikely to be the best thing anyone's seen this year, but it nevertheless proves that an on-screen adaptation of a dark romance novel one might pick up in an airport (an actual joke in the movie) doesn't have to be a cringe-filled, smutty nightmare.

Showalter and his cast clearly had a right giggle making this – and, for the most part, you will too.

While Verity is ultimately too dull to truly provoke, Hathaway is sharp enough to cut through the mediocre muck surrounding her, giving her sections of the film a winningly wicked wink. She’s reason enough to see the film, even if the rest of it leaves a lot to be desired.

The film’s boring center is made much more so by the squeaky-cleanness of everything and the prim and proper acting.

The melodramatic power of Dakota Johnson and Anne Hathaway is squandered in a romantic tale that’s ludicrously muddled by suspicions of monstrous misdeeds.

Really, it’s just incoherent, the ultimate revelations exposing how little sense these characters and their actions make, which we wouldn’t be dwelling on so much if Verity at least knew how to be sexy or intriguing, or have more fun, along the way.

Ultimately, Verity is barely a movie; it's a series of montages in which beautiful people whisper at each other, have extremely passionate sex, commit murder, and snarl menacingly while Dakota Johnson reads aloud from a manuscript that might as well be called "The Exposition." It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.