Yikes. I thought this would turn out to be the best of the three movies I watched last night, I love Rebecca Miller’s Angela which I mentioned in the Ripe review, I must watch that again and review it some time – but I couldn’t have been more wrong. I normally love this kind of thing – Nine Lives springs to mind, obviously Short Cuts ... I love strong independent female characters like this, and I love all three of the actresses playing the parts. Even the Little Children style voiceover didn’t bug me so much at the start, in retrospect because I figured it was going to be a Little Children style voiceover.

Well, let’s focus on the voiceover. It basically ruins the movie and is best summarised by one of the lines in it at the end following Fairuza Balk’s character spotting cuts and bruises on the arm of a hitchhiker she picked up – “She saw the edge of a wound, bruises …” he says … yes, thank you, we just saw that. It just bugged the hell out of me all the way and that was the last straw. I’ve read a couple of reviews, including Roger Ebert’s, that singles out the Balk story as the most engaging, and it’s true, but honestly even there I just wasn’t grabbed by this movie at all as much as I expected to be. The subtitle reads “Three Portraits” and I’d honestly rather see three beautiful photographs of the actresses – or even blown up stills from the movie, they all certainly have their standalone moments – hanging on the wall of an art gallery. The 90 minute blessing really doesn’t apply here, I’m afraid.