Kristin Scott Thomas wows critics on stage and screen

Can Kristin Scott Thomas do no wrong? She is currently being widely talked up for an Oscar nomination for her part in the French movie I've Loved You So Long. And in New York last week she received rave reviews for her Broadway debut as the vain Russian actress Arkadina in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. Now she has notched up another success for her role in a new film adaptation of Noel Coward's play Easy Virtue, which tells the story of a young Englishman who falls foul of his parents when he impetuously marries an American divorcee.

In today's Times, its theatre reviewer Wendy Ide praises Scott Thomas (pictured centre with fellow cast members Kimberley Nixon and Katherine Parkinson), who plays the mother of the love-struck son. She writes that the actress "dominates the story with a deliciously toxic performance" with her "every comment dripping with acidic disdain and repressed fury."

However, Ide is not so nice about the rest of the cast, which includes Ben Barnes, Jessica Biel and Colin Firth (pictured), all of whom attended the movie's London Film Festival premiere last night. She gave it only two stars (out of five), saying: "Noel Coward would be seething in his smoking jacket if he were still around to witness the hash that has been made of his play."

Her general view is that the Australian/writer director Stephan Elliott, whose previous credits include The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, has not quite mastered his brief. Firth, she feels, is "curiously absent" as Scott Thomas's husband, and Biel, as the movie's temptress, while "undeniably beautiful", is "missing the fire that could have ignited this battle of wills".

Ide also singles out for scorn the movie's soundtrack. "Particularly ghastly are the contemporary songs," she writes. "I spotted Car Wash and Sex Bomb – reworked in the style of Mad Dogs and Englishmen. This, presumably, is what it sounds like when you run out of ideas in the first 30 minutes of the film."