Who does she think she is?

W.E. is Madonna’s second outing as a film director, and this tells ‘the greatest royal love story of the 20th century’ via two women separated by more than half a century: Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) and a modern-day New Yorker, Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a society wife who becomes obsessed with Mrs Simpson when her possessions come up for auction at Sotheby’s. These days, it is common practice to ridicule and deride Madonna — just who does she think she is? And so on — but I am not of this camp, believe this film has much to teach us, and the top ten lessons are as follows.

1. I now know that Sotheby’s appears happy for anyone to truck up at any time, day or night, open or closed, and rummage through auction items as if fondling bits of tat at a car boot sale. I plan to pop along this evening and, if all goes well, will upturn a priceless Chinese vase and wear it as a hat.

2. With the right amount of directorial mishandling, you can utterly waste the talent of two actresses who are otherwise first-class. This directorial mishandling must include clunky montages, slo-mo, jump cuts between two narratives that are banally connected but fail to inform each other, and a camera that takes for ever just to shoot a tree which isn’t even an interesting tree. With all this in place, your actresses will not stand a chance. I am now so convinced of this that if you try it, and it does not work, I will give you your money back. No questions asked.