| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 18, 2011

Echoing the words of the great Porter song, Easy Virtue deliciously misbehaves.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 19, 2009

Biel is not completely miscast in this role of the Other in the drawing-room midst, but she exudes a thoroughly contemporary air that never jibes with the Twenties tenor of the English manor-born in the decade after the Great War.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 19, 2009

These are good actors telling a good story, so the virtue is indeed easy to grasp, and a fine time should be had by all.

| Original Score: B | Jun 12, 2009

Easy Virtue has all the elements for a sprightly romp with serious underpinnings, and occasionally it achieves that balance. But it's marred by attempts at farce that are as belabored as they are ill-advised.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 11, 2009

Jessica Biel gets more publicity for her body and her boyfriend than for her acting ability, but Easy Virtue may be cause for a reassessment.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 10, 2009

What might've been a scrumptious, chocolatey dessert of a movie -- a Noel Coward delite -- is instead a scoop of lemon ice, not filling, faintly sweet and mostly water.

| Jun 5, 2009

Full of forced jocularity and drawing-room hissy fits, with its cast parading around in vintage threads and antique cars, Easy Virtue is a close-to-insufferable souffle based on the 1925 Noel Coward play.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 5, 2009

The only characters who seem anchored in some form of reality are the hero's parents...all the others, from siblings to servants, are standard-issue eccentrics or the subjects of running gags.

| May 29, 2009

[Director] Elliott had a choice in Easy Virtue, to turn away from the horror or face it. He takes his time, but he eventually does face it -- and delivers up a good movie.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 29, 2009

Full of gorgeous architecture and sightlines but a bit too cold for comfort and with an all-too pervasive air of tedium.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 29, 2009

Elliott nearly turns the whole affair into a musical, with characters singing snatches of Coward and Cole Porter songs. But his sense of humor is extremely broad.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | May 29, 2009

There's supposed to be some distance between the main character and the family she marries into — but that distance probably shouldn't include acting styles.

| Original Score: 5/10 | May 28, 2009

Those coming in cold may be forgiven for thinking they've wandered into Atonement remade as a farce.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 28, 2009

Easy Virtue has enough traces of Coward's wit to keep you hoping for the first hour or so, but then the film collapses under the weight of too many misguided innovations.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 28, 2009

Unusually for a play by Noel Coward, Love struggles while conquering All in Easy Virtue, a subversive view of British country-house society between the wars.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 28, 2009

Jessica Biel in a teacup-rattling '20s period piece? With her lewd pinup grin and husky flat voice, she sticks out like a sore starlet in Easy Virtue -- but that's the whole point in this loosely 'freshened up' version of a Noël Coward play.

| Original Score: B- | May 27, 2009

Goes down as light and fizzily as a flute of Champagne tossed back in an airy drawing room.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 22, 2009

The first Noel Coward play to hit the big screen in more than 40 years, Easy Virtue is a crass, heavy- handed and -- most unfor givably -- largely laugh-free adaptation of The Master's infrequently revived 1924 comic melodrama.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | May 22, 2009

The elegant barbed wit of Noel Coward bubbling up in a time of Wolverine grunts. I must be dreaming.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 22, 2009