ANGELS AND INSECTS (62)

Directed by: Philip Haas

Starring: Mark Rylance, Kristin Scott Thomas

The Pitch: In 19th-century England a young entomologist marries into the aristocracy, gradually discovering the dark secret behind his new family.

Theo Sez: A sly, cruel joke in fabulous saturated colours, the various high-born ladies looking like great butterflies in their garish dresses - not coincidentally, as per the title. These effete, decadent, by the end thoroughly creepy English aristocrats are the butt of the film's amused contempt, and the American-born Haas dissects them with an entomologist's detached precision: a poisonous - though also rather sad - anachronism, their arrogant belief in privilege as irrelevant to the emerging age of classless democracy as their sexual practices are repugnant to the new Darwinian theories of breeding and evolution. The film's meticulous rhythm is a mixed blessing - it's pointed but also slow, clever but cerebral. Nonetheless it gives the climactic revelation a potent charge, and anyway it's hard to begrudge the movie its guiding intelligence: when a vital plot point is divulged through a spelling-game - the word "INSECT" coming back transposed as you-know-what - one is ready to forgive these film-makers anything.