Self-betterment swill, to do with a cutthroat London bond trader (Russell Crowe, disconcertingly fey) who inherits from his uncle a rundown wine-growing estate in Provence, the happy stamping ground of his boyhood holidays, and who, returning there to sell the place, falls again under its spell -- and under that of a hot-as-a-pistol brunette -- and recaptures the magic of youth. Ridley Scott (who directed Crowe in Gladiator, too) extols the enchantments of bucolic tranquillity in a hectic visual style, and with a busy soundtrack, amounting to self-sabotage. The only bright spots, exactly two of them, are the brief appearances of Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi (a top-line star on the continent) as the hero's French legal advisor, a role that affords her fractionally more screen time than her blink-of-an-eye appearance in Munich, plenty long enough to emit a blast of Mediterranean soulfulness. With Marion Cotillard, Abbie Cornish, Tom Hollander, Albert Finney. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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