Emmanuelle

To audiences mature enough to remember the 1970s franchise just this side of soft-core porn, the project will feel like a big-screen prawn cocktail: a cultural relic reimagined. Everyone else may simply be puzzled.

That a filmmaker who previously displayed such a deep understanding of the pleasures and burdens of the female body is behind this tepid exercise in desire is a great shock — and an even bigger shame.

This is unadulterated torture.

Beyond ill-advised.

The film is not wanting for alluring, dramatic situations, but the filmmakers seem at best haplessly blind and at worst blithely dismissive of their potential.

This Emmanuelle 2.0 comes across as inert and self-conscious, confusing torpor with languor, and endowing the non-sex scenes and also the sex scenes with blankness rather than tension or anticipation or pleasure.

Emmanuelle is aimless, dramatically inert and a little too safe to invest in.

Rarely transgressive, rarely meeting the measure of sensual, and rarely coherent, Audrey Diwan does little to modernise the Emmanuelle character and even less to make her feel adventurous and feminist. Emmanuelle is perfunctory and unforgivably pedestrian

…even by the low, low standards of the brand-name, this rebooted Emmanuelle just isn’t tender or perverse enough to be worth your attention…

This is an erotic voyage that quickly runs aground, hamstrung by a pedestrian narrative and a mannered, overly stylised visual palette that resembles a TV perfume commercial.