I once interviewed Soderbergh in front of an LA audience and found him humourless and self-important. Both qualities run solidly through Side Effects, a thriller with noirish aspirations starring Jude Law as a shrink who might have been manipulated by a troubled patient. Visually it is immaculately rendered, and the twisty narrative satisfyingly suggests that all is not what it seems. But it is also desperately leaden, the action hinting at proper drama rather than simply getting on and showing it (a few people in our cinema gave up and left around half-time). I'm sure the jobbing B-movie directors of the late 1940s — the silver age of film noir — would have made short, unfussy and efficient work of it.

Law's svelte professional life gallops out of his control when it becomes apparent that medication he has prescribed might have had terrible side effects. All of this should be quite absorbing. But it's not just the film's self-consciousness which makes one feel detached. It is quite simply that none of the characters is especially interesting or likeable.

This is a real problem for so much "personal" drama now. It almost makes me appreciate the popularity of superhero and action films, where such considerations are either inbuilt or of little importance. Ambiguity to the point of nihilism in your characters is now seemingly the Holy Grail, but there's a price to be paid for such complexity and that is an increasing lack of interest on the part of the audience. 

You don't necessarily have to like the protagonists unreservedly, and they don't have to be paragons. But they have to be interesting enough for you to care what happens to them. Otherwise, their fates pass before eyes which become glassier and glassier, and eventually stop watching altogether.

Danny Boyle takes this unlikeability to new heights in Trance, his first film since the Olympics opening ceremony made him man of the moment (he must be mightily relieved that the deaths of hundreds of hospital patients came to light months after his paean to the NHS, which in retrospect looks like state propaganda). Ostensibly a psychological thriller about an art dealer (James McAvoy), a hypnotist (Rosario Dawson) and a stolen painting, it comes across more as a screenwriters' workshop on the creative benefits of free association.