The curse of coffee-table cinema

Movies are all about illusion, and the greatest illusion of them all is the illusion of quality. This is Miramax’s stock-in-trade. It takes stories that seem a bit classy – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Shakespeare in Love, Chocolat – and turns them into cultureless mush, affected little movies which are grand in their own way, and which win Oscars, but which are actually meritless escapades fine-tuned to dupe the public.

Miramax has given the world a host of cliches about European culture – naughty French priests, macho Greeks, hoity-toity Englishmen, zany Italians – and has reduced human complexity to a bunch of hopeless stereotypes bursting with sentiment. Yuck. I hate Miramax. It is the cinematic equivalent of coffee-table books and slim cuisine: full of big type and hidden sugars, but popular with those who want a taste of culture with a minimum of effort. Telegraph UK