Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) – 2.9

A film that epitomizes Hollywood’s idea of ‘artful’: 90 minutes of drawing-room cinematography with mediocre actors speaking in ambiguously ‘international’ accents and feigning unrequited amorousness.  In other words, a pretentious bore.  The film is pretty in only the shallowest sense, and utterly lacking in substance or dramatic weight.  Colin Firth – sporting a limp and greasy hairdo – plays the painter Jan Vermeer, who, in recent years, has joined the hallowed ranks of Van Gogh and Monet in the most-popular-artists-to-be-canonized-on-umbrellas-and-coffee-mugs Hall-of-Fame.  Scarlett Johansson goes through the motions as his housemaid and muse with typical lips-half-parted spaciness.