This wispy, time-shifting romance represents a clumsy change of pace for edgy director Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Nurse Betty). His adaptation of AS Byatt's 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel evokes neither the poetry nor the passion of its source, while Gwyneth Paltrow and LaBute regular Aaron Eckhart phone in their drippy performances as literary sleuths researching the amorous secrets of bisexual Victorian poet Jennifer Ehle and her married lover Jeremy Northam. As the contemporary academics unearth the truth behind their dry studies - and LaBute bodice-rips away in arch 19th-century flashbacks - they find themselves falling under the spell of their subjects' romantic obsession. Low on mystery and emotional engagement, but high on Americans abroad clichés and chocolate-box settings, this is a frostily remote French Lieutenant's Woman wannabe.

Maud Bailey, a brilliant English academic, is researching the life and work of poet Christabel La Motte. Roland Michell is an American scholar in London to study Randolph Henry Ash, now best-known for a collection of poems dedicated to his wife. When Maud and Roland discover a cache of love letters that appear to be from Ash to La Motte, they follow a trail of clues across England, echoing the journey of the couple over a century earlier.