Reviewed - Catwoman: The 41st worst film of all time, according to visitors to the Internet Movie Database, is in fact a reasonably diverting exercise in high camp featuring some of the most gorgeously decadent costumes and the most divine eye makeup a girl could hope to find without dying and going to Cher's personal heaven, writes Donald Clarke

And, darling, the skin! I have never seen a film that had so much to do with the epidermis. Not that we care, those awful little men on the Internet who have been complaining that Halle Berry (just ravishing, by the way) was too black to play Catwoman need not have worried.

Here re-invented as a goody in a world with no Batman, just look how her naked bits have been made to radiate with the most bizarre golden sheen. When Berry and her fabulously glamorous arch-enemy Sharon Stone - whose flesh gives off a dulled halogen glare - share the screen the effect is like watching duelling sunbeams.

Which is not to say that Catwoman isn't nonsense. No amount of gloss can excuse the awful dialogue (at one point Berry grabs somebody's tongue just so she can inquire whether the cat has indeed got that organ), the occasionally rubbishy set-dressing (a scene among huge air-conditioning fans in 2004?) and the fact that the director's name is Pitof. But there can be little doubt that most of Catwoman's hilarious archness is intended, and if the movie does not become a camp classic then my name's Barbarella.

The truth is that the overly compliant, cinematically illiterate drones who write for the Tuna Fish Sentinel and the Beaver City Chronicle need to identify one whipping boy each year to prove they have some critical teeth. And it helps - there still being an unhappy amount of misogyny out there - if such a film (last year's was J-Lo's only ordinarily dreadful Gigli) stars an actress perceived to be getting above herself.

This explains the hysterical scorn directed at Catwoman by the US press and its inevitable triumph in the increasingly pathetic Golden Raspberry awards.

Worse films have, however, won Best Picture Oscars. Well, I can think of at least one.