Letters to Juliet

This cheerfully ridiculous Tuscan-set romcom is notable for a likably, if not quite intentionally mad performance from our own Vanessa Redgrave; for sheer loopiness Redgrave may now have topped that stunningly barking Lifetime Bafta acceptance speech she gave in February. Amanda Seyfried plays Sophie, a wholesome young American woman, on a romantic vacation in Verona, in Italy, who finds herself utterly entranced by the local tradition of lovelorn women therapeutically writing letters to Shakespeare's Juliet, and leaving them on the walls of her supposed house. She joins the team of women of adorably differing ages, all speaking-a English-a with an Italian-a accent-a, whose job it is to write back to these unhappy souls.

Sophie discovers a yellowing old letter written in the 1950s, lost in the brickwork and contacts this unknown correspondent, who then shows up in Italy – now a feisty, impetuous yet life-affirming grandmother (Redgrave), intent on rediscovering her lost Italian amore. She is accompanied by her dishy-but-pompous hunk of a Brit grandson Charlie, played by Australian star Christopher Egan, whose mangled English accent makes him sound as if his epiglottis has been kidnapped by aliens. Charlie meets cute with Sophie of course, but it is Redgrave who steals the show, with a performance that could be described as away with the fairies – if the fairies had taken out a timeshare on Alpha Centauri.

She is heroically unfocused and her dialogue responses are always dreamily late, as if speaking on satellite telephone, so much so that she is in danger of replying to the previous question, like a Two Ronnies sketch. As an antidote to the sugar, what we need now is a grumpy film called Letters to Lady Macbeth, in which malcontents leave rage-filled missives in the battlements of Glamis Castle.