Very best movie i ever watch

Purely Joyful Movie!

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Blistering performances.

We humans come in so many different mind-sets that, astonishingly, a film like this tedious, annoyingly mundane and meaningless churning can actually have value to some.For me it was a time for slapping my face to stay awake, looking for gummed tape to hold up my eyelids. But then, there was such a marvelous pay-off, again, not for all of us but for those with iron clad stomachs. What was it? The boring protagonist discovers that all his children are really the offspring of his wife's long time sexual relationship with her brother. Indeed, he walks in on them slapping loins, at some point.One looks for meaning in all forms of literature only to find that, perhaps, life might very well be devoid of meaning. Maybe that is what those given to this drivel have objectified.

A Victorian period drama with quasi erotic bits! Poorly acted, bland and boring and for much of the time very predictable for me. The main characters are pretty lame and are acted much the same.Mark Rylance, as William Adamson, seems to have perfected an expression of blank emotion (or maybe it's just boredom).Patsy Kensit's character exists to simply have a different frock on in EVERY scene she's in or get her kit off.Douglas Henshall provides the 'evil' character & is actually quite good, he doesn't overdo it so it never reaches the pantomime stage, however Annette Badland has no trouble in reaching these dizzy heights as Lady Alabaster (PK's characters mother).Kristin Scott Thomas plays a subdued second female lead and, like Henshall, comes away with some credit One has to assume it's not the actors fault as the director, Philip Haas, surely got what he asked for.How on earth this got the Evening Standard award for Best British film in 1995 beggars belief (it MUST have been a BAD year).

An intelligent and unusual drama, based on a short story by A.S. Byatt. In mid 18th century England, a penniless naturalist who has lost his prized specimens from the Amazon in a shipwreck (I think the movie meant him to be a young Charles Darwin, though an incident where specimens were lost in a shipwreck happened to his colleague Alfred Russell Wallace) gets a job cataloging specimens held by the Alabaster family in their country estate. He will eventually marry their daughter Eugenia (Patsy Kensit), despite the fierce opposition of her brother Edgar. Not long after having children with her, he will discover a terrible secret haunting the family. A cousin of the Alabasters, the bookish Matty (Kristin Scott Thomas) will turn out to be his only friend and ally. At times the movie looks like a strange cross between a film by James Ivory and a film by Peter Greenaway, with the Alabaster women carrying bright colored clothes that suggests different sort of insects. Even if you don't take the entomology references throughout comparing insects with humans very seriously, they are nonetheless fun. And the denouement is terrific.

A U.S.-British co-production for PBS, from A.S. Byatt's story "Morpho Eugenia" (a better title!), this head-scratcher of a human drama involves a Victorian England bug-specialist who comes to stay with a wealthy family and falls in love with his benefactor's lovely but unstable daughter. A carefully plotted picture, which might mean slow or sluggish--yet the film is never boring. Moments of eccentricity, romance and surrealism are blended together with skill, and the actresses in particular (Kristen Scott Thomas and the wonderfully brave Patsy Kensit) are first-rate. It's a difficult film, but one worth staying with. **1/2 from ****