Harmony Korine's third film, after the intriguing Gummo and the awful Julien Donkey-Boy, is a much more temperate affair, backed by handsome widescreen cinematography from Marcel Zyskind, Michael Winterbottom's long-time collaborator. It's goodbye to Dogma and hello to orthodoxy.

The orthodoxy, however, hardly extends to the plot which has Michael Jackson (Diego Luna) meeting Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) in Paris and travelling to an idyllic seaside Scots castle where they meet, among others, Charlie Chaplin and Shirley Temple.

They are all misfits turned impersonators and we are abjured to enjoy their company just because of that.

Both Luna, the Mexican actor, who proves good at mimicking Jackson's dance moves in dark shades, surgical mask and high white socks, and Morton, dressed in Marilyn's white dress from The Seven Year Itch, achieve a few little miracles.

But the rest, including James Dean, Abe Lincoln, The Three Stooges and, if you can believe it, James Fox and Anita Pallenberg as Pope John Paul II and Queen Elizabeth II, soon push the film into the realms of quirky parody.

It runs out of steam sometime before they all prepare to stage a vaudevillian revue and the eccentric commune's sheep start dying of some fatal infection.

If Korine wants to say something about celebrity, it gets drowned out in the plot-turns. But if he wants to sympathise with these strange denizens of other people's personas, Mister Lonely has a certain success.