The signs had been there throughout the opening half hour, but I realised that the Beatles-scored, Clement-and-La-Frenais-scripted musical Across the Universe was iredeemably silly and rubbish when a girl called Prudence climbed into our Liverpudlian hero's apartment through the kitchen window. Oh, the hero's called Jude, by the way. And the heroine is called Lucy. Indeed, there are so many obvious cues and clues to Beatles tracks it made me wonder how an already overlong film (directed by Julie 'Lion King' Taymor) didn't, in fact, go on for days. Surely somewhere on the cutting room floor is a scene where the protagonists, while protesting the Vietnam war (as they repeatedly do throughout) paint a submarine yellow. And an entire character called Eleanor Rigby (it's a huge suprise that a character introduced as 'Rita' turns out to be a lesbian circus performer rather than a meter maid). Not to mention a scene where Jude twists his ankle and, er, shouts.

Attempts to parlay the Beatles' back catalogue into any sort of narrative almost invariably results in schmaltz, crass commercialism, or pure inanity, and this falls into the last category. Perhaps a better title would have come from John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band: Cold Turkey.