She-Devil Details

Fay Weldon's dark, acerbic tale of rejection and revenge receives the full Hollywood “wash and brush up” treatment here, reducing its saturnine charm to frothy candyfloss. The whole farrago is hopelessly miscast with a wet and vapid Meryl Streep as the vamp novelist Mary Fisher, a cardboard cut-out Ed Begley Jr as the errant husband she snares, and, most disappointing of all, Roseanne Barr as a curiously weak and woolly She-Devil. Watching this makes you appreciate once more the celebrated BBC television adaptation that starred Patricia Hodge, Dennis Waterman and Julie T Wallace.

Cinematic adaptations of novels are under no obligation to remain rigorously faithful to the original, but even with... read more on Time Out