Like Frozen River, the Bret Easton Ellis adaptation The Informers can be read as a damning indictment of contemporary American society, but there the similarities end fairly abruptly. The early 1980s Los Angeles backdrop is a microcosm of rapacious greed, joyless hedonism and reckless overuse of hair- styling products. Populated by movie- industry sharks and their Valium-addled former trophy wives, oblivious rich kids with perfect tans and no parental guidance and frazzled, paranoid rock stars with pin cushions for arms, this is a world on the brink of a sudden, shocking wake-up call. For all the lasciviously filmed tawdry sex and enthusiastic substance abuse, ultimately the film is a morality tale in which the guilty are duly punished.

Directed by Gregor Jordan, Ellis’s aimlessly dissolute collection of stories just doesn’t hang together as a coherent whole. The message is as subtle as a dodgy nose job: “I want someone to tell me what’s good. And I want someone to tell me what’s bad” bleats coked-up trust fund party boy Graham (Jon Foster). This one-note adaptation serves as a fairly neat example of the latter. If the film was slightly better, it might be poignant to note that it was Brad Renfro’s last movie. As it is, it’s hard to imagine a more depressing cinematic epitaph.

15, 98 mins

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