Colin Firth goes from hero to zero in Toronto

You have to feel for the English actor Colin Firth. One week it's straight to the podium - the next it's straight to video. On Monday we were reporting his best actor award at the Venice film festival for his lead role in Tom Ford's debut, A Single Man.

Today, as they pack away the red carpet in Toronto, another Firth vehicle, Dorian Gray, goes down as one of the worst reviewed films shown at the festival - so underwhelming that it cannot yet find a north American distributor and looks destined for cable and video.

The adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is directed by Oliver Parker and stars Ben Barnes (above, right) in the title role and Firth (above, left) as Dorian's mentor, Lord Henry Wotton.

Gregory Ellwood, writing from Toronto for Hitfix, called the film "pretty much a complete train wreck." Among its many weaknesses, he said, were that it never adequately explained what keeps Dorian Gray so young, while the orgy and sex scenes were "laughable".

As for Firth, "he seems like he's just waiting for the movie (or in his case the shoot) to end".

Michael Glitz, writing for the Huffington Post, said he knew he was in for a long 107 minutes the moment the film began. "Some bad movies almost instantly feel artificial" - and this was one of them.

Of the corruption of Dorian Gray by Firth's pleasure-seeking Wotton, he wrote: "Few things are quite as depressing as deviance when it's dull - not only are you bored, but you can't even think about sinning after the movie is over, it seems so tiresome."

Dorian Gray is not the only new British film struggling to find a willing distributor in north America: as reported here, Creation, which stars Paul Bettany and opened the Toronto festival, is also in trouble. The debate is whether that's because it tells the story of Charles Darwin, and his theory of evolution remains controversial in America, or because it's boring.