Inexplicably the recipient of five Oscar nominations, this stunningly bland and stultifyingly boring slice of French Heritage arthouse is destined to be adored by that breed of movie-goer (generally female, middle-aged, middle-class and middlebrow) who despises cinema but hasn't realised it yet. So saccharine it could rot your teeth, Chocolat is the slowest-moving and easily the soppiest slice of cinema witnessed since Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-stop Cafe, and it's picking up awards left, right and centre.

As its title hints, it's all about chocolate, with the thinly-veiled suggestion throughout that said brown stuff is, in fact, better than sex. It's set in a rural French village strictly under the thumb of the Catholic Church, where God is in his heaven and all is well with the world, until Juliette Binoche arrives in town to open a 'chocolaterie' (call it a choc-shop and dispense with the French accent, I would suggest). This triggers an epidemic of choc-guzzling among the local females (including a typically frosty Dame Judi Dench) and provokes the wrath of tyrannical nobleman Monsieur le Conte (Molina), while the local priest rails thunderously from the pulpit against such a decadent, brazen, disgraceful form of pleasure-seeking.

As an exercise in utter meaninglessness, Chocolat ranks right up there with documentaries about yak-herding in the Himalayas. The target audience, one suspects, won't be too bothered: its mind-numbingly simplistic message (pleasure good, guilt bad) is so trite it just might please crowds in their droves, and it's all very pretty and pleasing to the eye, with Binoche simpering throughout in trademark fashion, and Johnny Depp turning up in an insulting eye-candy role (guitar-strumming gypsy) which barely requires him to sleepwalk.

Hallstrom (Cider House Rules) directs it so ponderously (if oh-so-tastefully) that the movie's 115 mintes seem considerably longer, lending it the status of a Milk Tray ad stretched to feature length. Too stately and polished to dismiss as downright awful, Chocolat's adoring reception nonetheless defies belief.