Slaughterhouse-Five

A curiosity, really. A slight and conservative adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's tale about a man whose time sense is dislocated: his wartime past, which includes being bombed in Dresden, his American bourgeois present as an optometrist, and his sci-fi fantasy future on the planet Tralfamadore, develop as three concurrent narratives. Occasionally Hill comes up with some nice touches of the unexpected: a few moments of black humour, the suggestion of a deliberate pastiche here and there, but on the whole he's too resolutely fashionable a director to really get behind Vonnegut's idea of time-tripping. It ends up the wrong side of unadventurous.