Valkyrie

There are times when you wonder whether Valkyrie is propelled by the sheer vigour of Tom Cruise alone. So muscular, so strutting is his performance that the entire tale of Claus von Stauffenberg - a German count and colonel who attempted to assassinate Hitler - seems to ride along on his shoulders.

Such a performance would make sense were this some kind of Mission-Impossible action romp. But Valkyrie has dreams of historical grandeur that make the slickness of Cruise's turn - and the general shininess of this movie (directed by X-Men honcho Bryan Singer) - feel wholly inappropriate.

Cruise seems to be forever playing the role of von Stauffenberg with the twinkle of a man who knows he is Tom Cruise, which rather defeats the object. It's swishly done of course, plotted to within an inch of its life and peppered with performances by Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Izzard and Terence Stamp, but this isn't enough to make it interesting or especially entertaining.

Its major flaw, though, is its modernity and excess: the sheer number of accents at play, the fact that villains never merely glower, they glower with added scary music, and the nagging thought that this must have been awfully expensive to make, but who on earth will want to see it? ·