The Gingerbread Man, a neo-noir thriller that unwinds with off-kilter promise, is the big yawn.

Robert Altman the up-and- down director meets John Grisham the constant mediocrity. Just where, in our hypothetical picture, should we place that unlikely scene?

Altman had a fine time composing difficult shots, through screens, bushes and sheets of rain, and Chungwei's images, sometimes delicate, sometimes harsh, stick with you long after you've forgotten their context.

Robert Altman forsakes the scattershot storytelling technique of Nashville and The Player for a more conventional form of movie-making with this dramatisation of a John Grisham story set in Savannah, Georgia.