Nothing so very wrong with that, necessarily, but the movie fails to make us care about these people.

The adaptation by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock takes some liberties with the novel to create a simplified, sexualised Julia-Sebastian-Charles love triangle. Julia Flyte (Hayley Attwell) is the beautiful sister with whom Charles's tragically mistimed affections are finally engaged. Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon) is in Venice with his mistress Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson) is back at home and her private mortification at the failure of her marriage has redoubled the fierce, unforgiving faith imposed on her children. Sebastian takes him to this marvellous pile called Brideshead, where Ryder falls in love both with the house and the eccentric Catholic family. But when he does, he - and we - are whooshed upstream along the Isis of time, back to 1920s Oxford where he had fallen under the spell of aesthete and exquisite Lord Sebastian Flyte, played by Ben Whishaw. As an officer in the second world war, the ageing and cynical Ryder finds himself billeted at a country house which he does not at first recognise.

Now it's Matthew Goode playing Charles Ryder: a decent performance from this excellent newcomer, who is the only actor who fully inhabits the fiction.

There is neither time nor space to swoon, and without it the sensual rapture will mean nothing, and neither will the story's attempt to convert that swoon into revelation and faith. Famously, Waugh's modestly sized novel was then allowed 11 episodes and 650 minutes of screen time to luxuriate in every languorous moment - only one episode fewer than the BBC's War and Peace a decade before - so this feature looks like the Reader's Digest quick version. It offers no compelling reasons for a screen revival, and the look and feel are nakedly derived from Charles Sturridge's tremendous 1981 version for Granada television, right down to using Castle Howard once again for the eponymous country house. W hy revisit it? There is something pretty superfluous about this handsome-looking, workmanlike but fundamentally uninspired and obtuse adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's resplendent 1945 novel.

Brideshead revisited 1945