Catherine Breillat sets aside her characteristic dans ton visage eroticism, but clings to her usual feminism to retell with crisp dispatch Perrault's blood-curdling, much-analysed fairy tale of how a medieval virgin did for the serial uxoricide, Barbe Bleue. Breillat's tactic is to have the story read in a cosy attic in a modern French chateau by an eight-year-old girl (by implication Breillat herself) to her slightly older sister as a way of terrifying her. An interesting conceit, a clever film but somewhat perfunctory and altogether less interesting than, for instance, Neil Jordan and Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves.