PodBill Just what I expected

ActuallyGlimmer The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

patrick powell An 18th-century English writer, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, once wrote (putting Alexander Pope in his place): "Satire should, like a polished razor keen, wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen". This is exactly what Evelyn Waugh's novel A Handful Of Dust does and the film, in my view, fully does the novel justice. Waugh's satire here is very underplayed, very understated and very funny, but none the less utterly lethal for all that. Charles Sturridge and his fellow screenwriter's have, as far as I can see, stuck extremely close to the novel, which is no bad thing as Waugh was an extremely economical writer and there would be little point in trying to gild the lily. Although Waugh wrote his novel as a young man, his thorough dislike of modernity - which he regarded as insincere cant - in every shape or form is already apparent and he mercilessly sends up its more vicious aspects. But Waugh was too intelligent just to hate for hate's sake: it was the loss of admirable qualities in favour of 'progress' which upset him. So in the novel and film Tony Last behaves well to everyone despite a great many people, not least his 'modern' wife Brenda, treating him appallingly badly. He is loyal, values tradition, honest, accommodating and indulgent and in return loses everything. Brenda is conventionally sweet but is simply a self-centred monster who lives without a thought for anyone, and always gains what she wants. One reviewer here complained that 'nothing' happens in the film. Not a bit of it. A great deal happens but everyone is so polite and well-brought up that no one, not even Tony, questions the huge injustice of it all. If you are reading these reviews while considering whether to see this film, bear in mind the quotation with which I started my contribution: Satire that's 'scarcely felt or seen'. That will give you the key to enjoying a very good film indeed. (NB The full quotation putting down Pope runs: "Satire should, like a polished razor keen, wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen. Thine is an oyster knife, that hacks and hews, the rage but not the talent to abuse.")

Framescourer The hammerblow of human cruelty dressed in the velvet glove of pre-war hoch-Englishness. It's distressing that terrible things happen to the pathetic yet likable protagonist Tony (James Wilby) - even more so that they are delivered in the slow drip of self-interested scheming rather than in galvanising dramatic confrontations.Actually, Wilby is one of the two weak links of this film. He's not quite got the richness or range to suggest a redemptive development to his character. He's not sympathetic enough. The other might be Sturridge's peculiar, impressionistic direction that can fail to give the story enough propulsion.What the film does have are a number of fine performances from a top-drawer supporting cast. One fears Alec Guiness may be a final-frame cameo, but his contribution is in fact at least as substantial as Brando's in Apocalypse Now. Kristin Scott Thomas is quite excellent, at once endearing and blindly self-interested. And I also liked very much Pip Torrens, a really sharp study of a new sort of British gent - modern and knowing, but no cad. 6/10

dwblurb An excellent and faithful adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel, featuring fine performances from a notable cast. Kristin Scott Thomas' reception of the news of the death of her son is widely, and justly, famed (BTW is it Kristin, not Kristen and certainly not Kirsten). Alec Guinness is suitable malevolent, and James Wilby is fine as the well-meaning but helpless Tony.

bahamutx2 The filmmakers of 'A Handful of Dust' are the same creative dynamos behind the hugely popular 'Brideshead Revisited'. They take the approach they took to 'Brideshead', which Waugh wrote when he was happy, with 'Dust', a novel which Waugh wrote when he wife was cheating on him and when he hated his life. 'Brideshead' was a much happier novel, and many purists consider it not to be a good work of Waugh's because it is lacking the acidic wit, satire and disgust of his characters which can be found in many (though not all) of his works. 'Brideshead' is a slow novel, something which most Waugh novels aren't, and comes as close as Waugh ever came to writing a soap opera. So, instead of giving us a sharp, nasty satire, which the novel itself is, we get a blander, kinder and very unfunny version of the novel. The moral bankruptcy of the characters, more or less the point of the whole novel, is hardly registered. The characters are having a "jolly good time" doing some bad things, but Sturridge and the two other writers (!) don't convey that what their characters are doing is bad. They skip over it, and instead spend all their time in giving away plot twists in the beginning of the film, to create "suspense", and restructuring the film, so all the unimportant scenes get maximum screen time. Even with the nice scenery, the film lacks the speed and fragmentary narrative of the novel, one of the reasons why the novel was considered so revolutionary, and comes across as a blah, nearly witless, edited-for-TV episode of Masterpiece Theater, instead of the theatrical film which it is and should be. This shouldn't come as a surprise, though: 'Brideshead Revisted' aired for months on Masterpiece Theater. The actors, though many are miscast, do their best, most of the technical aspects are there in some form, but the real problem lies with the filmmakers and their unwillingness to make a film which might be dark, mean or angry.